Markus Schinle, Christina Erler, Adrian Rudolf Vetter, Wilhelm Stork
In order to exchange traceability information within supply chains, the use of Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) has recently been discussed in research and industry. As part of the Design Science Research Methodology (DSRM) chosen for this work, a structured literature review is conducted to provide a knowledge base regarding this topic. By reviewing the proposed approaches, a summary of collected requirements is given and the identified system concepts and design patterns are presented and discussed. The lack of mechanisms to protect trade secrets is identified as the most important challenge for the real-world application of such systems. There is a particular need for solutions when the exchange of information with third parties or the public is required but business-relevant data or metadata could be disclosed. Therefore, the research question arises, how sensitive data could be provided from inside a DLTbased system to external third parties by considering the risk of metadata analysis. As result, we propose an approach using existing mechanisms and design patterns to reduce the risk of competitor analysis. The applicability in real-world scenarios is focused, which is why a proof of concept is implemented as software artifact using Hyperledger Fabric. An evaluation of this artifact regarding the key requirements concludes this paper.
In this fast growing world, everything needs to change and upgrade with the technology to survive in this rapidly changing environment. The Food Supply Chain system is one of them. In traditional supply chain management functions, it is hard to manage the flow of traceability information of products timely and effectively among upstream to downstream stakeholders.This gap in the flow of information and untrusted traceability of product causes to generate food contamination hazards and also increasing the network of modern FSC systems is still challenging to provide quality, privacy, and integrity of traceability mechanism. HACCP and Blockchain-based FSC provide various functions to enhance the FSC process such as traceability,transparency, security among all stakeholders. In these functions, some most important functions of the Food Supply Chain system are traceability, amount of data sharing, and privacy of data of products among stakeholders. In this paper, we are going to provide an Enhanced Food Supply Chain Traceability system based on Federated Blockchain with HACCP using smart contracts. This model will manage by pre- selected leadersâ nodes. These leadersâ nodes have the right to control the action of middle nodes and lower nodes. The amount of data sharing can also be controlled by the leadersâ nodes.So, any particular transaction is restricted to perform by middle and lower nodes because the Federated Blockchain is partially decentralized. This model overcomes the issue of privacy concern which remains unsolved by blockchain-based FSC and makes a better and enhanced Federated Blockchain-based FSC traceability system.
Food is an essential aspect of our lives. Back in those days, people consumed seasonal fruits and vegetables which were available locally and on a daily basis. But things have changed when refrigeration units were invented. People were now able to store and consume food products which were nonseasonal also. In today's world, warehouses and cold chains are of striking importance because most of the food products that we see in our supermarkets and grocery stores come from them. Due to improper management of food products these warehouses have become an epicenter for food wastage. Since most of the traditional warehouses are manual or RDBMS based, they can be easily tampered. With these considerations in this paper, we have proposed an autonomous warehouse system which will tackle food wastage by using Machine Learning and Blockchain technology.
We explore the potential for a blockchain ledger to record supply chain provenances in an inherently trustworthy manner. The use of blockchain in this setting may allow for traceability of products through the supply chain without fear that an itemâs provenance is fraudulent or has been tampered with. We compare the desirable properties of a blockchain ledger to those of a traditional database. We also consider challenges to the trustworthiness of a provenance idiosyncratic to the context of supply chains. We present a case study in which we conduct a series of semi-structured interviews with members of the prawn aquaculture industry in Australia. This industry was chosen as it stands to gain from robust provenances due to international competition. We find that blockchain based technology is unlikely to deliver substantial gains to the industry when compared to alternatives. Rather, most gains are likely to arise from the industry becoming digitalized, which would be a precondition for any blockchain technology to be operational.
Konstantinos Demestichas, ÎÎčÎșÏÎ»Î±ÎżÏ Î Î”ÏÏÎÏ, Theodoros Alexakis, Evgenia Adamopoulou
Food holds a major role in human beingsâ lives and in human societies in general across the planet. The food and agriculture sector is considered to be a major employer at a worldwide level. The large number and heterogeneity of the stakeholders involved from different sectors, such as farmers, distributers, retailers, consumers, etc., renders the agricultural supply chain management as one of the most complex and challenging tasks. It is the same vast complexity of the agriproducts supply chain that limits the development of global and efficient transparency and traceability solutions. The present paper provides an overview of the application of blockchain technologies for enabling traceability in the agri-food domain. Initially, the paper presents definitions, levels of adoption, tools and advantages of traceability, accompanied with a brief overview of the functionality and advantages of blockchain technology. It then conducts an extensive literature review on the integration of blockchain into traceability systems. It proceeds with discussing relevant existing commercial applications, highlighting the relevant challenges and future prospects of the application of blockchain technologies in the agri-food supply chain.
Abstract This paper reviewed the existing and potential blockchain applications of this technology, which are to trade the agricultural wastes including animal wastes, energy, and byproducts among the farmers and entrepreneurs to generate wealth; to manage the animal product supply chains such as dairy products, beef, and chicken to enhance their safety and traceability; and to distribute the funds to refugees and migrants, displaced due to emergencies, to buy various farming inputs including feed. A blockchain is a distributed database of records in the form of encrypted âblocksâ (smaller datasets), or a public ledger of all transactions or digital events that have been executed and shared among participating parties and can be verified at any time in the future. The attributes such as integrity, immutability collaboration, organization, identification, credibility, and transparency of blockchain technology make it ideal for a number of applications in animal production and animal health sectors. Some potential applications of the blockchain technology in the livestock sector, not limited to the ones stated here, are to effectively manage various input supply chains, such as animal feed, de-wormers, medicines, and vaccines, among others; integration of feed composition and environmental footprint databases; and sustainability and technology outreach platforms. Current challenges toward increased application of the blockchain technology are also presented. These topics would serve as the starting points for future applications of the blockchain technology in animal farming.
Abstract Food industry is unique from the point of view of Efficient Consumer Response (ECR) which is a supply chain management initiative specific to the food industry and reflects organizationsâ efforts to achieve quick response to reaching to market and ultimately consumer using Electronic Data Interchange, RFID (Radio Frequency Identification and bar codes. This paper would focus on looking at pros and cons of evaluating traditional traceability (is an important link in protecting public health since it allows health agencies to more quickly and accurately identify the source of contaminated food, fruit or vegetables believed to be the cause of an outbreak of foodborne illness, remove them from the marketplace, and communicate to the supply chain) matrix versus newly introduced disruptive technology called blockchain. This report outlines various components of traceability and its relation to other parts and methodologies in ensuring food product authenticity the paper further outlines detailing of blockchain technology its various types, implementation with examples and application in food industry. The concluding part of paper compares traditional vs. blockchain methods in regard to cost benefit analysis and implementation perspective of blockchain. The paper through reasoning and arguments justifies that how blockchain bases systems of food traceability are more suitable from speed, confidentiality and ease of implementation perspective as compared to traditional electronic traceability and current systems. From limitation perspective this paper highlights how lack of interoperability is currently the biggest one obstacle preventing system-wide, farm-to-fork food product traceability.
In the digitized world, everything and products are being designed and used with the help of advanced technologies. The Agriculture industry is not an exception; Walmart has started tackling food safety by using blockchain technology in the supply chain. As agriculture is one of the most influential sectors for the world economy and has also a great impact on the livelihood of the people. As the agriculture industry is growing globally, it is difficult to keep an eye on the information of the whole food supply chain management. So be able to increase the transparency, food safety and customer satisfaction digitalization of food is the need of the hour. In context to Indian economy very little research has been done in the area of addressing farmerâs problem by using blockchain technology. This research will help in addressing the major issues of traceability, transparency and quality and trust in food supply chain management and the hybridisation of agriculture field by using blockchain technology. This new technology has led to new products and new methods to organise the supply chain in an efficient way and analyze the blockchain framework for the traceability of products. This study aims to find out the challenges and issues faced by the farmers in the food supply chain and to propose the relevant efficient and transparent solutions that will benefit farmers as well as customers in the long run.
The seafood supply chain is largely opaque, which allows for overfishing, organized crime,and even human rights abuses. Illegally caught fish enter the supply chain at various points, andimportant data about the fish (e.g. species, provenance, catch method, etc...) can be lost orfabricated. Although some third-party auditors offer to trace an actorâs supply chain, these services are expensive and the data are siloed away, leaving only the third-partyâs guarantee. One option for seafood traceability lies in blockchain technology, which marries a network of computers to an immutable, add-only ledger of transactions. In a supply chain managed by digital ledger technology, the potential for transparency is far greater than in the status quo. However, because the global seafood supply chain is so fragmented, and adoption of blockchain technology requires stakeholder buy-in at all levels of the supply chain, there exists no reliable roadmap for implementation. This Capstone Research Project will use a start-up company â DockChain â as a proxy to examine how to incentivize actors in the seafood supply chain to adopt blockchain technology.DockChain is a blockchain-enabled restaurant distributor and direct-to-consumer seafood subscription service. Dockchain aims to use blockchain in order to connect local seafood consumers with San Diegan fishermen through the use of a distributed application, and QR codes. This application will allow seafood consumers to scan a QR code to access a story showing all relevant key data elements and critical tracking events, such as the identity of the harvester, and where the seafood had been processed and filleted. The business will have three phases of development in which it will focus on particular markets for adoption. The primary fish that DockChain will purvey will be opah, because of its potential as to grow in popularity. Although opah will be the primary fish the company deals, DockChain will be eager to distribute other fish as well.
Spyros Voulgaris, Nikos Fotiou, Vasilios A. Siris, George C. Polyzos · 6 authors
The use of blockchains to improve product quality and safety control in food supply chains through transparent, trusted, and secure end-to-end traceability frameworks, has received increased attention in the last few years. The use of blockchains, though, does not come at no cost. Poor design of blockchain-based applications can lead to prohibitive costs, intolerable delays, and nonscalable systems. In this work we explore different architectures for blockchain-based traceability and quality control of produce, proposing, evaluating, and comparing four different scenarios. Our evaluation uses public and private Ethereum instances, and assesses the considered architectures in terms of cost and overall throughput.
The following topics are dealt with: innovation management; organisational aspects; Internet of Things; supply chains; social networking (online); cryptography; strategic planning; financial management; sustainable development; and supply chain management.
Supply chain traceability is one of the most important problems faced by all organizations globally. Tracking any commodity is a tedious job and requires a lot of manual attention. The existing system uses a centralised database system to track a commodity. Blockchain is a decentralised, immutable ledger managed by a cluster of computers. The very nature of blockchain makes it suitable technology for traceability in a supply chain. Blockchain creates immutable records. Once a transaction is stored in the blockchain, it is impossible to tamper it illegally. This immutability of blockchain builds trust among the participants that conduct business in a lack of trust environment. Using consensus protocols, blockchain builds trust between the various participants. Blockchain provides traceability since immutable records are added in blockchain; it is easy to track the source of the product. This paper illustrates the Application of Blockchain in Agri-Food Supply Chain. It unfolds how blockchain technology can be integrated to an Agri Supply Chain and improves the traceability. This integration enables companies to quickly track unsafe products back to their source and see where else they have been distributed. This integration can result to prevent illness and save lives, as well as reduce the cost of product recalls.
May 1, 2020·2020 IEEE 6th Intl Conference on Big Data Security on Cloud (BigDataSecurity), IEEE Intl Conference on High Performance and Smart Computing, (HPSC) and IEEE Intl Conference on Intelligent Data and Security (IDS)
With the rapid development of economic globalization, cooperation between countries, between enterprises, has become a key factor whether country and enterprises can make great economic progress. In these cooperation processes, it is necessary to trace the source of business data or log data for auditing and accountability. However, multi-party enterprises participating in cooperation often do not trust each other, and the separate accounting of the enterprises leads to isolated islands of information, which makes it difficult to trace the entire life cycle of the data. Therefore, there is an urgent need for a mechanism that can establish distributed trustworthiness among multiparty organizations that do not trust each other, and provide a tamper-resistant data storage mechanism to achieve credible traceability of data. This work proposes a data traceability platform architecture design plan for supply chain management based on the multi-disciplinary knowledge and technology of the Fabric Alliance chain architecture, perceptual identification technology, and cryptographic knowledge. At the end of the paper, the characteristics and shortcomings of data traceability of this scheme are evaluated.
The BeefLedger Export Smart Contracts project is a collaborative research study between BeefLedger Ltd and QUT co-funded by the Food Agility CRC. This project exists to deliver economic value to those involved in the production, export and consumption of Australian beef to China through: (1) reduced information asymmetry; (2) streamlined compliance processes, and; (3) developing and accessing new data-driven value drivers, through the deployment of decentralised ledger technologies and associated governance systems. This report presents early insights from a survey deployed to Chinese consumers in Nov/Dec 2019 exploring attitudes and preferences about blockchain-credentialed beef exports to China. Our results show that most local and foreign consumers were willing to pay more than the reference price for a BeefLedger branded Australian cut and packed Sirloin steak at the same weight. Although considered superior over Chinese processed Australian beef products, the Chinese market were sceptical that the beef they buy was really from Australia, expressing low trust in Australian label and traceability information. Despite lower trust, most survey respondents were willing to pay more for traceability supported Australian beef, potentially because including this information provided an additional sense of safety. Therefore, traceability information should be provided to consumers, as it can add a competitive advantage over products without traceability.
The globalization of the food supply chain industry has significantly emerged today. Due to this, farm-to-fork food safety and quality certification have become very important. Increasing threats to food security and contamination have led to the enormous need for a revolutionary traceability system, an important mechanism for quality control that ensures sufficient food supply chain product safety. In this work, we proposed a blockchain-based solution that removes the need for a secure centralized structure, intermediaries, and exchanges of information, optimizes performance, and complies with a strong level of safety and integrity. Our approach completely relies on the use of smart contracts to monitor and manage all communications and transactions within the supply chain network among all of the stakeholders. Our approach verifies all of the transactions, which are recorded and stored in a centralized interplanetary file system database. It allows a secure and cost-effective supply chain system for the stakeholders. Thus, our proposed model gives a transparent, accurate, and traceable supply chain system. The proposed solution shows a throughput of 161 transactions per second with a convergence time of 4.82 s, and was found effective in the traceability of the agricultural products.
AdriĂĄn E. Coronado MondragĂłn, Christian E. Coronado Mondragon, Etienne S. Coronado
Along with Internet of Things -IoT-, distributed ledger/blockchain technology can provide substantial benefits to the management of supply chains. However the adoption of blockchain-based solutions may face substantial challenges such as scalability, which happens when several parties have to access and record information in a single blockchain. The use of two or more blockchains may help to mitigate such problem but it may require the use of an alternative architecture that enables interoperability. This work investigates the feasibility of adopting an agnostic blockchain architecture based on the particularities of the supply chain commonly found in the fisheries sector. A case in the fisheries sector in Atlantic Canada, characterized for the capture of different species destined for markets worldwide, is used to explore the adoption of an agnostic blockchain architecture. Emerging concepts such as agnotic blockchain applied to the supply chains of perishable goods may open the door to the development of innovative solutions.
Haan Johng, Doohwan Kim, Grace Park, JangâEui Hong · 6 authors
Blockchain technologies are intended to help enhance the trustworthiness of information, by improving transparency, traceability, and immutability of business logic and information, hence with the potential to be applicable to business process reengineering (BPR). However, an ad hoc approach to adopting blockchain technologies during BPR may lead to not better, but worse, than the current business processes, and with disappointments. In this paper, we present Fides - a framework for systematically utilizing blockchain towards enhancing business processes with trustworthiness. Fides takes a goal-oriented approach, in which trust-related concerns are explicitly represented as (soft)goals to be achieved, problems for achieving the goals are diagnosed, and then alternatives are explored in terms of business processes for eliminating or alleviating the problems, while at the same time achieving the goals. Finally, a selection is made among the alternatives that best utilize blockchain. To illustrate, and also see both strengths and weaknesses of Fides, a retail chain for a food supply chain is used throughout the paper, and is implemented using Ethereum and Hyperledger Fabric. Feedback from companies and students indicates that Fides leverages the level of confidence in the quality of the reengineered business processes, in utilizing blockchain.
Zhihao Hao, Dianhui Mao, Bob Zhang, Min Zuo · 5 authors
Current food traceability systems have a number of problems, such as data being easily tampered with and a lack of effective methods to intuitively analyze the causes of risks. Therefore, a novel method has been proposed that combines blockchain technology with visualization technology, which uses Hyperledger to build an information storage platform. Features such as distribution and tamper-resistance can guarantee the authenticity and validity of data. A data structure model is designed to implement the data storage of the blockchain. The food safety risks of unqualified detection data can be quantitatively analyzed, and a food safety risk assessment model is established according to failure rate and qualification deviation. Risk analysis used visual techniques, such as heat maps, to show the areas where unqualified products appeared, with a migration map and a force-directed graph used to trace these products. Moreover, the food sampling data were used as the experimental data set to test the validity of the method. Instead of difficult-to-understand and highly specialized food data sets, such as elements in food, food sampling data for the entire year of 2016 was used to analyze the risks of food incidents. A case study using aquatic products as an example was explored, where the results showed the risks intuitively. Furthermore, by analyzing the reasons and traceability processes effectively, it can be proven that the proposed method provides a basis to formulate a regulatory strategy for regions with risks.
Jiang Duan, Chen Zhang, Yu Gong, Steve Brown · 5 authors
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), one out of 10 people get sick from eating contaminated food. Complex food production process and globalization make food supply chain more delicate. Many technologies have been investigated in recent years to address food insecurity and achieve efficiency in dealing with food recalls. One of the most promising technologies is Blockchain, which has already been used successfully in financial aspects, such as bitcoin, and it is attracting interests from food supply chain organizations. As blockchain has characteristics, such as decentralization, security, immutability, smart contract, it is therefore expected to improve sustainable food supply chain management and food traceability. This paper applies a content-analysis based literature review in blockchain adoption within food supply chain. We propose four benefits. Blockchain can help to improve food traceability, information transparency, and recall efficiency; it can also be combined with Internet of things (IoT) to achieve better efficiency. We also propose five potential challenges, including lack of deeper understanding of blockchain, technology difficulties, raw data manipulation, difficulties of getting all stakeholders on board, and the deficiency of regulations.
A large number of food scandals (e. g., falsely declared meat or non-compliance with hygiene regulations) are causing considerable concern to consumers. Although Internet of Things (IoT) technologies are used in the food industry to monitor production (e. g., for tracing the origin of meat or monitoring cold chains), the gathered data are not used to provide full transparency to the consumer. To achieve this, however, three aspects must be considered: a) The origin of the data must be verifiable, i. e., it must be ensured that the data originate from calibrated sensors. b) The data must be stored tamper-resistant, immutable, and open to all consumers. c) Despite this openness, the privacy of affected data subjects (e. g., the carriers) must still be protected. To this end, we introduce the SHEEPDOG architecture that âshepherdsâ products from production to purchase to enable a trustworthy, secure, and privacy-aware food monitoring. In SHEEPDOG, attribute-based credentials ensure trustworthy data acquisition, blockchain technologies provide secure data storage, and fine-grained access control enables privacy-aware data provision.
Jedsada tipmontian, Jaime Castellanos Alcover, M. Rajmohan
Todayâs food supply chain is incredibly complex and imposes enormous challenges across the Globe. Products are transported through multimodal transportation internationally, comprising of combination of ship, rail, truck and flight modes etc. The supply chain under multistage network poses more quality related issues. Hence, blockchain technology helps to enhance food safety and quality in the logistics process. This, when coupled with the existing traceability system can create more agile value chain and closer customer relationship across regions. Though, Thailand is a leading food exporter, it lacks in implementation of blockchain technology. The objective of this study is to analyse the impact of blockchain technology adoption for safe food supply chain management through System Dynamics (SD) approach from management perspectives in Thailand. The preliminary survey and discussion were carried out with the participants from food expert firms, and causal loop diagrams and stock and flow diagrams were developed and validated. The trade-off, challenges and opportunities of applying block chain technology on the global food value supply chain has been discussed throughout the system dynamics model. The major contribution of this work is in providing insight into some of the main dimensions of block chain technology and its implications for global food value chain performance improvements.