Traceability Decentralization in Supply Chain Management Using Blockchain Technologies
This addresses the need for reliable traceability in supply chains, particularly for industries facing regulatory mandates, though it is incremental as it applies existing blockchain concepts to this domain.
The paper tackles the problem of data integrity and transparency in supply chain traceability by proposing a decentralized model using blockchain technologies, which is evaluated and compared to traditional systems to show improvements in tamper-proofing and transparency.
With the increase of web users and applications with real time requests, the ability to identify, track and trace elements of a product as it moves in the supply chain is deemed necessary, and for many industries is even mandated by national or international regulations. Traceability presupposes the integrity and transparency of data that is saved and shared. This is a problem for current technologies, as there are many examples with tampered data and database vulnerabilities that resulted in serious implications and data loss. A solution to this problem can be the decentralization of the system, which will remove the central point of failure. To that effect, blockchain or DLT technologies, an emergent technology that enables the decentralization of a network can be used, by implementing a trustless model to achieve it. Blockchains are tamperproof and transparent, which means that by exploiting blockchain characteristics, traceability can be improved. A model that describes the decentralization process of the supply chain traceability part has been developed for this paper and is later evaluated and compared with the traditional system.