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Blockchain-based Agri-Food Supply Chain: A Complete Solution
Abstract and Figures
Supply chains are evolving into automated and highly complex networks and are
becoming an important source of potential benefits in the modern world. However, it is challenging to track the provenance of data and maintain traceability
throughout the network. Consumers are now more interested in food’s and product’s quality. The traditional supply chains are centralized and they depend on third party for trading. The traditional centralized systems lack transparency, accountability and auditability. In our proposed solution, we have presented a complete 1 solution for blockchain-based Agriculture and Food (Agri-Food) supply chain. It leverages the key features of blockchain and smart contracts deployed over ethereum blockchain network. Although blockchain provides an immutable network for supply chain events, it still lacks in solving major problems like accountability, traceability and credibility of supply chain events. Therefore, there is a need of reliable system that ensures traceability, trust, trading and delivery mechanism in Agri-Food supply chain. All transactions in the proposed scheme are uploaded to blockhain; while, it ultimately uploads the data to Interplanetry
File Storage System (IPFS). The storage system returns a hash of the data which is stored on blockchain and ensures efficient, secure and reliable solution. Futhermore, simulations and evaluation of smart contracts along with the secuirty and vulnerability analyses are also presented in this work.
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Agritech uses advanced technologies to boost the efficiency, sustainability, and productivity of farming. The Internet of Things (IoT) in agriculture has brought sensors and networked technology to gather and analyse environmental and crop data, enabling precision farming that optimises resource usage and increases yields. Yet, current agricultural methods suffer from unsecured and decentralised data management, causing inefficiencies and complicating traceability across the supply chain. The integration of IoT with blockchain technology is seen as a promising solution to enhance data‐driven agriculture. Blockchain provides a secure, decentralised, and transparent ledger that enhances data integrity, reduces fraud, and improves traceability, which complements IoT applications. The authors detail the development of an innovative system that orchestrates IoT and blockchain technologies to facilitate the adoption of new technologies in agriculture and overcomes the lacked of comprehensive data connectivity. It outlines a conceptual framework and its preliminary empirical implementation. The system consists of three integrated layers: the IoT layer, which creates digital twins of field crops; the blockchain layer, which secures and manages data from the field and external stakeholders for dynamic applications such as track and tracing; and the orchestration layer, which fuses physical and digital data to optimise business models, enhance supply chain productivity, and support governmental policy‐making, thereby improving field productivity and food sector innovation.
Blockchain is a modern-age technology which records digital transactions in a consistent, safe, and verifiable form to solve the problems from different sectors. In the supply chain, this technology is applied to improve traceability, ownership, and trust. Moreover, it can solve the issue pertaining to counterfeits in the supply chain. However, blockchain-based supply chains have certain disadvantages, such as privacy of the information shared between the members of the supply chain. In this paper, a new mechanism has been proposed to ensure the privacy of such information by taking traceability and ownership into account. The novelty of the proposed system is its ability to achieve privacy with the inclusion of traceability and ownership. To implement privacy, we employed a combination of symmetric and asymmetric key encryption. With the proposed system, owner of the product can trace said product and the one who owns the product can transfer the ownership. The proposed system restricts the entry of counterfeit products in the supply chain. The Hyperledger Sawtooth blockchain has been used for the experimental purpose. The subsequent analysis show that the proposed system can provide privacy without disturbing factors concerning traceability and ownership. The results show that the inclusion of privacy does not impact performance significantly.
Purpose: The recent development in logistics due to the dawn of Logistics 4.0 has made global logistics providers more dependent on intelligent technologies. In this era, these technologies assist in data collection and transmission of logistical data and pose many security and privacy threats in logistics management systems. The customer’s private information, which is shared among the logistics stakeholders for optimal operation, faces unauthorized access due to a lack of privacy. This, amongst others, is a critical problem that needs to be addressed with blockchain. Blockchain is a disruptive technology that is transforming different sectors, and it has the potential to provide a solution to the issues mentioned above, with its unique features such as immutability, transparency, and anonymity. Method: This study designed a blockchain-based logistics management architecture on a decentralized peer-2-peer network using Ethereum smart contracts. The proposed system deployed the Rivest–Shamir–Adleman (RSA) asymmetric encryption method to protect the logistics system from cyber-attacks and secure customers’ private information from unauthorized access. Findings: Furthermore, the security and privacy of the proposed system are evaluated based on the theorem. The proof shows that the system can provide security to the logistics system and privacy to customers’ private data. The performance evaluation is based on throughput and latency. It shows that the proposed system is better than the baseline system, and the comparatives analysis shows that the proposed system is more secure and efficient than the existing systems. Implication and Limitation: The proposed system offers a better solution to the security/privacy of the logistics management system and provides recommendations to key stakeholders involved in the logistics industry while adopting blockchain technology. Apart from the study’s methodological limitation, it is also limited by a lack of reference materials.
The food industry is highly dependent upon food supply chains. It is highly critical for the quality of the food product that reaches the consumer, that all actors that interact with the corresponding supply chains act responsibly and according to the appropriate regulations. Because of that, monitoring of food supply chains is a necessity nowadays. The main problem of current food supply chain systems is the lack of transparency, traceability, and sustainability as those are required to operate in a complex ecosystem, involving multiple stakeholders across different countries. Blockchain technology has been proposed as the means to enhance existing systems by increasing transparency and traceability, and thus regain customer’s trust. This paper aims at providing a state of the art with regards to the use of blockchain technology in the food industry and food supply chains in particular. The survey summarizes all relevant research efforts and concludes with the main findings, while it also identifies existing challenges and limitations.
Technological innovations and applications are used extensively in food and beverage businesses. It is seen that these innovations and applications give the food and beverage businesses competitive advantage, difference and originality. One of the technological innovations that can provide a different dimension to food and beverage businesses is blockchain technology. In this direction, this research aims to evaluate the possible advantages of blockchain technology to businesses if used in the supply chain process of food and beverage businesses. The research is a conceptual study, a detailed literature review on blockchain technology has been done and has been combined and evaluated within the framework of food and beverage businesses. As a result of the literature review, the advantages that may arise from the use of blockchain technology in food and beverage businesses are grouped under three headings: "traceability and transparency", "reliability" and "efficiency".
Supply chains are evolving into automated and highly complex networks and are becoming an important source of potential benefits in the modern world. However, it is challenging to track the provenance of data and maintain traceability throughout the network. The traditional supply chains are centralized and dependent on third party for trading. Centralized systems lack transparency, accountability and auditability. In our proposed solution, we have presented a blockchain-based reputation system in Agriculture and Food (Agri-Food) supply chain. It leverages the key features of blockchain and smart contract deployed over ethereum blockchain network. Although blockchain provides an immutable network for supply chain events, it still fails to solve the problem of trust among entities. Therefore, a reputation system is required that logs reviews of sellers and maintains the trust between trading entities.
With the rapid development of electronic information technology, online transaction will gradually surpass traditional market transaction, among which online payment and asset delivery become the focus of attention. But in fact, due to the incomplete third-party payment mechanism and the intrusion risk of various charging Trojan, it is easy to cause a trust crisis. The existing centralized framework often leads to information asymmetry between the two parties. Therefore, how to realize the fairness of payment and the auditability of assets in the distributed system is a challenging problem. The emerging blockchain technology provides a new method with its openness, transparency and verifiability. Existing researches do not provide a complete shopping model for consumers, most of which focuses on payments or only on asset delivery. In this paper, we propose an auditable fair payment and physical asset delivery protocol based on smart contracts. Three types of smart contracts are designed to achieve reliable and fair payment among merchants, consumers and logistics companies. The traceability and auditability of blockchain provide an effective method to audit assets and data sharing in the whole transportation. In view of the phenomenon of goods being switched, the way of "pre-verification" is added. In order to prevent the illegal elements to fake pickup code, induce consumers to conduct illegal operations, cause property loss, in our system the pickup codes are generated by consumers to reduce the risk of fraud. In addition, our plan designs a complete return process for the first time, providing better service experience and higher efficiency for consumers. Finally, all the contracts involved in the scheme are implemented and deployed on the ethereum test network. The results of security analysis and evaluation showed that our scheme was improved in cost, with high security and availability.
The globalized production and distribution of agricultural produce bring a renewed focus on the safety, quality and validation of several important criteria in agriculture and food supply chains. The growing number of issues related to food safety and contamination risks has established an immense need for effective traceability solution that act as an essential quality management tool ensuring adequate safety of products in the agricultural supply chain. Blockchain is a disruptive technology that can provide an innovative solution for product traceability in agriculture and food supply chains. Today's agricultural supply chains are complex ecosystem involving several stakeholders making it cumbersome to validate several important criteria such as country of origin, stages in crop development, conformance to quality standards and monitor yields. In this paper, we propose an approach that leverages the Ethereum blockchain and smart contracts efficiently perform business transactions for soybean tracking and traceability across the agricultural supply chain. Our proposed solution eliminates the need for a trusted centralized authority, intermediaries and provides transactions records, enhancing efficiency and safety with high integrity, reliability, and security. The proposed solution focuses on the utilization of smart contracts to govern and control all interactions and transactions among all the participants involved within the supply chain ecosystem. All transactions are recorded and stored in the blockchain's immutable ledger with links to a decentralized file system (IPFS), and thus providing to all a high level of transparency and traceability into the supply chain ecosystem in a secure, trusted, reliable, and efficient manner.
Blockchains or distributed ledgers are an emerging technology that has drawn considerable interest from energy supply firms, startups, technology developers, financial institutions, national governments and the academic community. Numerous sources coming from these backgrounds identify blockchains as having the potential to bring significant benefits and innovation. Blockchains promise transparent, tamper-proof and secure systems that can enable novel business solutions, especially when combined with smart contracts. This work provides a comprehensive overview of fundamental principles that underpin blockchain technologies, such as system ar-chitectures and distributed consensus algorithms. Next, we focus on blockchain solutions for the energy industry and inform the state-of-the-art by thoroughly reviewing the literature and current business cases. To our knowledge, this is one of the first academic, peer-reviewed works to provide a systematic review of blockchain activities and initiatives in the energy sector. Our study reviews 140 blockchain research projects and startups from which we construct a map of the potential and relevance of blockchains for energy applications. These initiatives were systematically classified into different groups according to the field of activity, implementation platform and consensus strategy used. 1 Opportunities, potential challenges and limitations for a number of use cases are discussed, ranging from emerging peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading and Internet of Things (IoT) applications , to decentralised marketplaces, electric vehicle charging and e-mobility. For each of these use cases, our contribution is twofold: first, in identifying the technical challenges that blockchain technology can solve for that application as well as its potential drawbacks, and second in briefly presenting the research and industrial projects and startups that are currently applying blockchain technology to that area. The paper ends with a discussion of challenges and market barriers the technology needs to overcome to get past the hype phase, prove its commercial viability and finally be adopted in the mainstream.
Distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) have the potential to transform the global food system by introducing important efficiency gains along value chains, and improving trust, transparency, and traceability. While large actors are likely to make fast and significant inroads in exploiting DLTs, small farmers and processors also stand to reap significant benefits, provided the technology is made accessible to them. This paper seeks to make an initial contribution to the emerging public debate on this issue by providing an overview of DLTs and their application in food and agriculture, examining public policy implications for food security and rural development, and identifying some potential challenges, risks, and the way forward.
The blockchain revolutionizes the creation of both scalable information technology systems and diversified applications by integrating the increasingly popular artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and big data. Various industries have recently begun to implement the exploration of blockchain. It will not take long for the blockchain to spread all over the world. In order to identify and further the development of the blockchain technology, this paper reviews the extant studies on the blockchain and its key components, blockchain-based IoT, blockchain-based security, blockchain-based data management, and the main applications based on the blockchain, and it delineates potential trends and challenges. This study provides a comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art blockchain and describes a forward-looking direction.
The adoption of agricultural products traceability management based on Internet of Things (IoT) technology provides excellent benefits for the current food safety issues. The provenance data can demonstrate agricultural products movement process from the countryside to the dining table. However, the massive provenance data incurs an inefficient query. Meanwhile, the provenance data can be tampered deliberately which affect food safety. There are seldom reported approaches that can solve the above problem effectively. In this paper, we propose a data storage model based on Inter-Planetary File System (IPFS) and blockchain. First, IPFS is used to store video, images, and real-time monitoring data reported from the sensors. Then, in order to avoid a malicious user in case of data faking attack, we exploit the blockchain to store the IPFS hash address of the provenance data. Based on that, we design an authentication mechanism based on blockchain. It can verify the data and ensures effective data security. The experimental results show that the proposed approach can outperforms the existing methods. © Computer Society of the Republic of China. All rights reserved.
The steady increase in food falsification, which has caused large economic losses and eroded consumers’ trust, has become a pressing issue for producers, researchers, governments, consumers and other stakeholders. Tracking and authenticating the food supply chain to understand provenance is critical with a view to identifying and addressing sources of contamination in the food supply chain worldwide. One way of solving traceability issues and ensuring transparency is by using blockchain technology to store data from chemical analysis in chronological order so that they are impossible to manipulate afterwards. This review examines the potential of blockchain technology for assuring traceability and authenticity in the food supply chain. It can be considered a true innovation and relevant approach to assure the quality of the third step of the analytical processes: data acquisition and management.