Agri-food systems are continually evolving to feed an ever-growing population. However, several challenges such as quality products, inefficient supply chain, and excessive food wastage are needed to be faced in order to meet global demand. Among these constraints, supply chain traceability systems are one of the technology solutions that can identify and resolve the challenges of agri-food systems. The traditional supply chain lacks traceability, transparency, and information exchange. In this work, the blockchain projects utilizing the public and private blockchain platforms are discussed. Also, the product ownership management has been developed using Hyperledger composer for tracing the flow of agriculture products at every stage. It supports storing the supply chain activities as a ledger transaction in a permanent and immutable way. Agriculture products are mentioned as lots with a unique lot code provided for each batch of products. The chain of lot codes can be used to identify the product along the supply chain. This system ensures product ownership.
TopIntroduction
Blockchain for business is the combination of a shared and immutable ledger that can open opportunities for blockchain innovation in businesses. A consensus among network members is provided to eliminate risk and efficient management of assets throughout the business network. These blockchain platforms ensure to activate and manage a secured, automated business network across multiple stages in an organization. Hyperledger is an open-source, not-for-profit blockchain platform, that accelerates the adoption of business technologies. Many business requirements trust Hyperledger because of its hosting organization, LINUX foundation. It paves way for enterprises to design a customized business network in terms of writing consensus algorithms, block data structure, and multi-language options which is an added advantage over other blockchain platforms. In China, the Yijian Blockchain Technology Application System is a Hyperledger Fabric-based blockchain, a permissioned platform. It is in production with Hejia a pharma chemical industry, to eliminate some of the financial challenges in it. The system is designed to reduce the turnover time of funds on the supply chain and inform banks about the process and allow to grant early funds to the pharmaceutical manufacturers and retailers (QuillHash, 2019). The retailer giant Walmart has successfully completed two pilot projects using Hyperledger Fabric: Pork in China and Mangoes in America (IBM., 2017).
Another blockchain solution using a permissioned fabric network is for Borsa Italiana, the Italian Stock Exchange Group. The shareholder data is managed to expand credit access at the same time. The blockchain solution is developed to replace the paper trading certificates with a digital streamlined process for a transparent process of trading among various parties (FinExtra., 2017). TenneT Energy Community is utilizing blockchain solutions for the efficient management of energy supply. It analyses the integration of energy supplied in electric cars and household batteries into the electric grid. TenneT is currently involved in two pilot projects such as collaboration of Vandebron in the Netherlands for efficient supply of electricity according to the demand, the second project by Sonnet services in Germany (the energy group of the Sonen group) integrates the use of solar batteries with wind energy in order to effectively use the renewable energy sources with this joint venture. SAP, (Systems, Applications, and Products in Data Processing) a multinational software giant has launched a cloud platform dedicated to corporate blockchain application development. The solution provides a framework to build business applications on top of Hyperledger Fabric given in Table 1.
A simple overview of Blockchain technology is needed to understand how Blockchain came into the spotlight for supply chain systems. Blockchain technology is originated from Bitcoin meant for storing cryptographically secured transactions in a centralized database (Nakamoto., 2008). Bitcoin is a public blockchain platform, where anyone can involve in it without any trusted third party. Bitcoin itself emerges as a trusted service to many domains other than finance (Yuan et al., 2016). Later Blockchain emerged as a breakthrough technology that can be adopted for various domains. Based on the criteria of authorization Blockchain can be divided into two types. They are permissioned and permissionless Blockchain. While Bitcoin, Ethereum comes under Permissionless Blockchain (Wood, 2014), Hyperledger Fabric comes under the Permissioned category (Cachin, 2016).
The main objectives of this work are to compare and analyze the suitable blockchain platform to develop a supply chain traceability system based on the business requirements. This work also aims to overcome the supply chain traceability issues like the information gap that arise among the stakeholders, achieving trust and trackability. The contributions of this paper are listed below.
- 1.
A comparative study has been made to analyze the commonly used blockchain platforms for business solutions
- 2.
Based on the study, a traceable supply chain application has been prototyped using Hyperledger composer playground.
- 3.
The different layers of the prototype have been explained.