Autonomous driving (AD) promises to disrupt current process management practices in the automotive industry, as processes now have to fulfill increasing requirements for safety, quality and liability. This paradigm change especially manifests itself among electrical system suppliers, as the electrical components transmit the vehicle's energy and communication flow, determining safety critical functions in the vehicle such as steering and braking. In this research, we conducted a multiple embedded case study in the electrical supplier industry in order to derive current challenges as well as future requirements for production processes of safety critical products in the age of autonomous driving. Our data suggest, that the established manufacturing process and practices are unable to fulfill the increasing need for digital continuity, transparency and documentation. To overcome those barriers, we propose a blockchain (BC) and Internet of Things (IoT) enabled traceability system. Through the application of BC, processes can be interconnected, tracked and audited, achieving higher security, liability and quality. This is the first paper, which investigates manufacturing of electrical systems for self-driving vehicles as a suitable use case for BC application.
Traceability system is a system that is able to record product movements along the supply chain and trace them back. In the food supply chain, traceability systems are considered important to ensure the safety of a product. There are two data architectures commonly used in traceability systems namely one-step-forward and one-step-back and aggregated information model architecture. In one-stepforward and one-step-back architectures, tracing process takes a long time and does not guarantee the integrity of the data. In aggregated architecture, data is integrated but rely on third parties as data managers. This research explores the possibility of another type of architecture, which is the blockchain based system. Blockchain based system allows an integrated system to occur without third party by distributing all data to each member of the supply chain involved. Exploration is done by making the FoodTrail Blockchain design using four blockchain system abstraction layers. FoodTrail Blockchain records and tracks the transfer and transformation of food products in the supply chain. Transfer and transformation are stored in the blockchain and can be traced using depth first search algorithm. The design was then implemented in a prototype using the Hyperledger Sawtooth framework. The prototype that are built are evaluated based on aspects that must be considered in the traceability system (breadth, depth, precision, and access) and blockchain (distributed, verified, and immutable). The evaluation shows that FoodTrail Blockchain fulfilled the distributed, verified, and immutable aspect. The system has low performance in transaction handling related to breadth and depth aspect due to limited server capacity and complicated process. However the system has advantages related to access and precision aspect, because all transaction is verified, immutable, and stored locally in every node.
Abstract Driven by successful pilot projects in supply chain and logistics, Blockchain has become one of the industry’s latest technology hypes. In this paper, we cut through the hype and shed light on the expectations of industry professionals towards the benefits and challenges of Blockchain. Also, we categorize current Blockchain applications that are expected to provide tangible benefits for supply chain and logistics processes. To explore such potentials, we argue that companies should gain own first-hand experiences through small-scale experiments.
This is the first work to introduce the use of blockchain technology for the electronic traceability of wood from standing tree to final user. Infotracing integrates the information related to the product quality with those related to the traceability [physical and digital documents (Radio Frequency IDentification-RFID-architecture)] within an online information system whose steps (transactions) can be made safe to evidence of alteration through the blockchain. This is a decentralized and distributed ledger that keeps records of digital transactions in such a way that makes them accessible and visible to multiple participants in a network while keeping them secure without the need of a centralized certification organism. This work implements a blockchain architecture within the wood chain electronic traceability. The infotracing system is based on RFID sensors and open source technology. The entire forest wood supply chain was simulated from standing trees to the final product passing through tree cutting and sawmill process. Different kinds of Internet of Things (IoT) open source devices and tags were used, and a specific app aiming the forest operations was engineered to collect and store in a centralized database information (e.g., species, date, position, dendrometric and commercial information).
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate meat traceability by outlining the different perspectives and opinions of meat supply chain stakeholders (SCSs); it also evaluates potential of acceptance of blockchain technology (BCT) as a viable transparency and traceability system (TTS). Design/methodology/approach A questionnaire survey of 141 consumers reveals their opinions about TTSs. In addition, semi-structured interviews with seven retail managers, four government officials and one blockchain service provider (Project Provenance Ltd) provide expert insights. Findings The results demonstrate that consumers are overwhelmed by the amount and complexity of certification labels. As a TTS, BCT implementation appears to have significant positive influences on consumers’ purchasing decisions, mediated by consumers’ quality perceptions. This study reveals the discordant perspectives of different stakeholders with regard to the importance of a BCT-based TTS. Originality/value This study investigates current TTSs and certification labels, and probes customer perception of a potential BCT-based solution for meat traceability. Changes to supply chains’ mentality and the active establishment of trust in BCT applications are needed. Firms should take both holistic and altruistic views to deal with the challenges of TTSs in the meat supply chain. The adoption of BCT, in combination with DNA coding, seems promising as a solution to many of the issues that currently plague TTSs.
This paper starts from the food quality problem and proposes a traceability system for agricultural products based on lot and blockchain technology. The architecture of the system is given and some existing problems are discussed. By using the consortium blockchain as the basic network and the IoT devices as the recorder, a more reliable, trustable and extendable traceability system can be achieved.
The food supply chain is a complex system that involves a multitude of "stakeholders" such as farmers, production factories, distributors, retailers and consumers. "Information asymmetry" between stakeholders is one of the major factors that lead to food fraud. Some current researches have shown that applying blockchain can help ensure food safety. However, they tend to study the traceability of food but not its supervision. This paper provides a blockchain-based credit evaluation system to strengthen the effectiveness of supervision and management in the food supply chain. The system gathers credit evaluation text from traders by smart contracts on the blockchain. Then the gathered text is analyzed directly by a deep learning network named Long Short Term Memory (LSTM). Finally traders' credit results are used as a reference for the supervision and management of regulators. By applying blockchain, traders can be held accountable for their actions in the process of transaction and credit evaluation. Regulators can gather more reliable, authentic and sufficient information about traders. The results of experiments show that adopting LSTM results in better performance than traditional machine learning methods such as Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Navie Bayes (NB) to analyze the credit evaluation text. The system provides a friendly interface for the convenience of users.
1Food safety is becoming more and more serious topic worldwide. To tackle the food safety issues from the technical aspect, people need a trusted food traceability system that can track and monitor the whole lifespan of food production, including the processes of food raw material cultivation/breeding, processing, transporting, warehousing, and selling etc. In this paper, we propose a trusted, self-organized, open and ecological food traceability system based on blockchain and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, which involves all parties of a smart agriculture ecosystem, even if they may not trust each other. We use IoT devices to replace manual recording and verification as many as possible, which can reduce the human intervention to the system effectively. Furthermore, we plan to use the smart contract technology to help the law-executor to find problems and process them timely.
The paper discusses the possibility of combining RFID and Blockchain technology to more effectively prevent counterfeiting of products or raw materials, and to solve problems related to production, logistics and storage. Linking these technologies can lead to better planning by increasing the transparency and traceability of industrial or logistical processes or such as efficient detection of critical chain sites.
Growing consumer awareness as well as manufacturers' internal quality requirements lead to novel demands on supply chain traceability. Existing centralized solutions suffer from isolated data storage and lacking trust when multiple parties are involved. Decentralized blockchain-based approaches attempt to overcome these shortcomings by creating digital representations of physical goods to facilitate tracking across multiple entities. However, they currently do not capture the transformation of goods in manufacturing processes. Therefore, the relation between ingredients and product is lost, limiting the ability to trace a product's provenance. We propose a blockchain-based supply chain traceability system using smart contracts. In such contracts, manufacturers define the composition of products in the form of recipes. Each ingredient of the recipe is a non-fungible token that corresponds to a batch of physical goods. When the recipe is applied, its ingredients are consumed and a new token is produced. This mechanism preserves the traceability of product transformations. The system is implemented for the Ethereum Virtual Machine and is applicable to any blockchain configuration that supports it. Our evaluation reveals that the gas costs scale linearly with the number of products considered in the system. This leads to the conclusion that the solution can handle complex use cases.
In response to food contamination scandals worldwide, retail giant Walmart is tackling food safety in the supply chain using blockchain technology. In 2016, it established the Walmart Food Safety Collaboration Center in Beijing and plans to invest $25 million over five years to research global food safety (Yiannas and Liu, 2017). Using IBM’s blockchain solution based on Hyperledger Fabric, Walmart has successfully completed two blockchain pilots: pork in China and mangoes in the Americas (IBM, 2017). With a farm-to-table approach, Walmart’s blockchain solution reduced time for tracking mango origins from seven days to 2.2 seconds and promoted greater transparency across Walmart’s food supply chain (Yiannas, 2017). IBM called it “complete end-to-end traceability” (McDermott, 2017). The case highlights the challenges of implementing blockchain technology in the food supply chain and the opportunities for deploying blockchain solutions throughout the global food ecosystem to increase safety and reduce waste.
You must be familiar with the word “organic agricultural products”, but because of the lack of universal credit vouchers in the market, people can't be reassured by the purchase of organic agricultural products. Therefore, it is particularly important to trace the agricultural products. The Blockchain technology has developed rapidly in recent years. This technology has aroused the attention of experts and scholars, and has become a hot topic. The Blockchain has the characteristics of decentralization, information security and trustworthiness. If the Blockchain is applied to the traceability system of agricultural products, the authenticity of organic agricultural products can be well tested. This paper introduces the formation process of Blockchain, describes the characteristics of Blockchain, and analyzes the model and the key technologies of Blockchain system. At last, the paper constructs a traceability system model based on the Blockchain technologies.
Mihai Hulea, Ovidiu Rosu, Radu Miron, Adina Aştilean
In the process of distributing pharmaceutical products multiple stages are involved until products are delivered to patient. A reliable way for validating and verifying that products had been maintained within a licensed range is required. The paper presents a solution for pharmaceutical cold chain management using distributed ledger technologies. An application framework is proposed for shipment tracking which will deliver information to all stakeholders during the distribution phase of pharmaceutical products. The solution is based on Hyperledger Sawtooth distributed ledger framework, which has been extended with a custom transactions family and a sensors gateway for automatically collecting data from temperature tracking devices. The focus of the paper is to describe the data model and how entities of the system communicate.
With the rapid growth of China's economy, people's living standard has been increased continuously, which changed the consuming habit of consumers, and more and more attention is paid to food safety and quality. However, in recent years, a series of serious food safety incidents occurred, such as "Sudan red", "clenbuterol", "Sanlu toxic milk powder" and "trench oi". It is worth noting that not only in China, but even in Europe these kinds of scandals have broken out during the past 20 years, including Escherichia coliin hamburgers, Salmonella in eggs, poultry and pork, Listeria in pates and cheeses, and the "horse meat scandal" in 2013. These food safety problems not only harm people's health, but also undermine their trust in food markets. <br/> The main purpose of this cumulative dissertation is trying to guarantee the food quality and safety from a supply chain management perspective, and the key issue is building a decentralized information system which is not dependent on the trust of a central authority or organization for the whole food supply chain. By using the internet of things and blockchain technologies, this new decentralized information system could become a disruptive innovation which could provide an information platform for all supply chain members (including government departments and third-party regulators) based on openness, transparency, neutrality, reliability and security. We want to establish a food supply chain traceability system for real-time food tracing, build a safety control system for food supply chain by integrating it with general supply chain risk management methods, and significantly improve the performance of the food logistics company. All of these will ultimately enhance the safety assurance of a food supply chain.
The work conducted for this thesis is meant to benefit both industry and the scientific community. Creating an assessment for blockchain technology in a specific industrial (supply chain) setting and later expand to a more general setting might prove useful for companies planning to use blockchain in the future or wanting to understand blockchain technology better. There is scarce academic research on blockchain technology in fields besides computer science and finance. Expanding the research territory is key to understand this new technological trend and in the case of supply chain management, blockchain technology might prove to be a key technological development in the years to come. This thesis is formed as an assessment of the strategic fit of blockchain technology in Norwegian fish supply chains. Further, the key findings from this specific strategic fit is used to find indicators for which types of supply chains blockchain technology could bring positive strategic implications. The thesis is structured so that relevant scientific theory and data is presented before making an assessment of the strategic fit and discussing the implications. Using the theory on supply chain management Fisher (1997) and Lee (2002) and key supply chain management objectives together with theory on innovation, through Rogers (1962), the following research questions were answered.\n\nRQ1: Why is blockchain technology beneficial for fish supply chains?\nRQ1.1: How is it beneficial?\nRQ1.2: Does the findings indicate benefits for other supply chains?\n\nThe research arrived at the conclusion that Norwegian fish supply chains might benefit from blockchain technology. This is mainly a conclusion drawn by the fact that Norwegian aquaculture producers were viewed to have lean supply chains and have functional products in the material flows as found through the models of Fisher (1997) and Lee (2002), and that the supply chain management objectives cost, quality and sustainability, with the cost and quality being integral to lean supply chain practices, were found to get the highest advantages. In addition, blockchain technology was found to benefit lean supply chains in general, especially food supply chains.
Summary An interesting research problem in our age of Big Data is that of determining provenance. Granular evaluation of provenance of physical goods (e.g., tracking ingredients of a pharmaceutical or demonstrating authenticity of luxury goods) has often not been possible with today's items that are produced and transported in complex, interorganizational, often internationally spanning supply chains. Recent adoptions of the Internet of Things and blockchain technologies give promise at better supply‐chain provenance. We are particularly interested in the blockchain, as many favored use cases of blockchain are for provenance tracking. We are also interested in applying ontologies, as there has been some work done on knowledge provenance, traceability, and food provenance using ontologies. In this paper, we make a case for why ontologies can contribute to blockchain design. To support this case, we analyze a traceability ontology and translate some of its representations to smart contracts that execute a provenance trace and enforce traceability constraints on the Ethereum blockchain platform.
In recent times food safety has drawn upsurge of academic and commercial concerns. In supply chain area, with the rapid growth of internet technologies, a lot of emerging technologies have been applied in traceability systems. However, to date, nearly all of these systems are centralized which are monopolistic, asymmetric and opaque that could result in the trust problem, such as fraud, corruption, tampering and falsifying information. Besides, centralized system is vulnerable to collapse, since a single point of breakdown will lead the whole system to be crashed. Today, a new technology called the blockchain which is a ground-breaking innovation in decentralized information technology presents a whole new approach. However, since this technology is still in its early stages, it has some inherent defects, in which scalability become a primary and urgent one when we face the mass data in the real world. In this paper we will build a food supply chain traceability system for real-time food tracing based on HACCP (Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points), blockchain and Internet of things, which could provide an information platform for all the supply chain members with openness, transparency, neutrality, reliability and security. Furthermore, we introduce a new concept BigchainDB to fill the gap in the decentralized systems at scale. The paper concludes with a description of a use case and the challenges to adopt blockchain technology in the future food supply chain traceability systems are discussed.