Department of Industrial Engineering, Stellenbosch University, 145 Banghoek Rd., Stellenbosch 7600, South Africa.
ESB Business School, Reutlingen University, Alteburgstr. 150, 72762 Reutlingen, Germany.
Sensors (Basel). 2023 Jan 27;23(3):1410. doi: 10.3390/s23031410.
Supply chains have evolved into dynamic, interconnected supply networks, which increases the complexity of achieving end-to-end traceability of object flows and their experienced events. With its capability of ensuring a secure, transparent, and immutable environment without relying on a trusted third party, the emerging blockchain technology shows strong potential to enable end-to-end traceability in such complex multitiered supply networks. This paper aims to overcome the limitations of existing blockchain-based traceability architectures regarding their object-related event mapping ability, which involves mapping the creation and deletion of objects, their aggregation and disaggregation, transformation, and transaction, in one holistic architecture. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel 'blueprint-based' token concept, which allows clients to group tokens into different types, where tokens of the same type are non-fungible. Furthermore, blueprints can include minting conditions, which, for example, are necessary when mapping assembly processes. In addition, the token concept contains logic for reflecting all conducted object-related events in an integrated token history. Finally, for validation purposes, this article implements the architecture's components in code and proves its applicability based on the Ethereum blockchain. As a result, the proposed blockchain-based traceability architecture covers all object-related supply chain events and proves its general-purpose end-to-end traceability capabilities of object flows.
供应链已经发展成动态的、相互关联的供应网络，这增加了实现对象流及其所经历事件的端到端可追溯性的复杂性。新兴的区块链技术具有在无需可信第三方的情况下确保安全、透明和不可变环境的能力，因此在这种复杂的多层供应网络中具有实现端到端可追溯性的强大潜力。本文旨在克服现有基于区块链的可追溯性架构在对象相关事件映射能力方面的局限性，该架构涉及在一个整体架构中映射对象的创建和删除、聚合和分解、转换和交易。因此，本文提出了一种新颖的“基于蓝图”的代币概念，允许客户端将代币分为不同类型，其中同类型的代币是不可互换的。此外，蓝图可以包括铸币条件，例如在映射装配过程时是必要的。此外，代币概念包含了在集成代币历史中反映所有已执行的对象相关事件的逻辑。最后，为了验证目的，本文在代码中实现了架构的组件，并基于以太坊区块链证明了其适用性。因此，所提出的基于区块链的可追溯性架构涵盖了所有与对象相关的供应链事件，并证明了其通用的端到端对象流可追溯性能力。
