Kamanashis Biswas, Vallipuram Muthukkumarasamy, Wee Lum Tan
The necessity of wine supply chain traceability system is inevitable due to increase in counterfeiting, adulteration, and use of excessive preservatives and hazardous chemicals. To overcome these issues, wine industry is in need of a traceability system which enables a consumer to verify the composition of each batch of wines from the grape growers to the retailers. However, most of the current systems are RFID and web based and thus it is possible to counterfeit stored information as required. This study proposes a blockchain based wine supply chain traceability system where every transaction is recorded as a block in the chain and is visible to the relevant participants. These blocks of information is immutable since any change to the recorded information will break the chain. In addition to providing quality information management framework, the proposed traceability system enables transparency, safety, and security in the overall process from the grape to the bottle.
For the past few years, food safety has become an outstanding problem in China. Since traditional agri-food logistics pattern can not match the demands of the market anymore, building an agri-food supply chain traceability system is becoming more and more urgent. In this paper, we study the utilization and development situation of RFID (Radio-Frequency IDentification) and blockchain technology first, and then we analyze the advantages and disadvantages of using RFID and blockchain technology in building the agri-food supply chain traceability system; finally, we demonstrate the building process of this system. It can realize the traceability with trusted information in the entire agri-food supply chain, which would effectively guarantee the food safety, by gathering, transferring and sharing the authentic data of agri-food in production, processing, warehousing, distribution and selling links.
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, inter-organizational, often internationally-spanning supply chains. Recent adoption of Internet of Things and Blockchain technologies give promise at better supply chain provenance. We are particularly interested in the blockchain as many favoured 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.