As an underlying and backbone technology of Bitcoin, Blockchain attracted extensive attention worldwide in recent years due to its unique characteristics of decentralization, openness, immutability, anonymity, etc., which enables it to build a trust basis through recording the point-to-point decentralized transactions in an immutable way via the attached timestamp, thereby improving system efficiency and reducing the cost without relying on the central agent. As it is considered to be a potentially revolutionary technology, Blockchain has been introduced into various industrial fields including finance, supply chain, manufacturing, healthcare, energy, and smart city. In this paper, we conduct a state-of-the-art survey of industrial Blockchain in terms of published articles between 2017 and 2020, and worldwide Blockchain movement including North America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific region so far. We conduct a statistic analysis of the collected articles in terms of three dimensions, which are year of publication, leading research institutes and researchers, and article classification to present a multi-dimensional trend or conclusion. Besides, we analyse articles that are cited over a certain number of times in detail to investigate the hot research directions. Finally, the challenges, opportunities, and future perspectives are discussed to summarize the main obstacles of industrial Blockchain and identify the open research questions in the near future.

Industrial Blockchain : A state-of-the-art Survey

In recent years, traceability systems have been developed as practical tools for improving supply chain (SC) transparency and visibility, especially in health and safety-sensitive sectors like food and pharmaceuticals. Blockchain-related SC traceability research has received significant attention during the last several years, and arguably blockchain is currently the most promising technology for providing traceability-related services in SC networks. This paper provides a systematic literature review of the various technical implementation aspects of blockchain-enabled SC traceability systems. We apply different drivers for classifying the selected literature, such as (a) the various domains of the available blockchain-enabled SC traceability systems and relevant methodologies applied; (b) the implementation maturity of these traceability systems along with technical implementation details; and (c) the sustainability perspective (economic, environmental, social) prevalent to these implementations. We provide key takeaways regarding the open issues and challenges of current blockchain traceability implementations and fruitful future research areas. Despite the significant volume and plethora of blockchain-enabled SC traceability systems, academia has so far focused on unstructured experimentation of blockchain-associated SC traceability solutions, and there is a clear need for developing and testing real-life traceability solutions, especially taking into account feasibility and cost-related SC aspects.

https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/14/4/2439/pdf

A Systematic Literature Review of Blockchain-Enabled Supply Chain Traceability Implementations

Today, the continuous growth of electronic commerce volume increases the importance of point-to-point shipment transportation. For this reason, it is extremely important that shipment management systems provide effective, efficient and fast service. A study of the literature shows that the improvements made in the field of transportation have been generally aimed at global logistics networks. In this study, unlike the existing literature, a blockchain-based solution is developed for local cargo networks. With this approach using Ultra High Radio Frequency (UHF-RFID), Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and blockchain-based smart contracts, a fast shipping management architecture that ensures security between the parties is provided. In this context, an automatic payment and approval mechanism is established between the parties using ethereum-based smart contracts. In addition, shipments equipped with RFID tags are automatically tracked and traceable using UHF-RFID antennas. The IoT data collected in the study are stored on a cloud-based server, which is a cost-effective solution. Smart contracts that enable communication between the parties are written in the Solidity language using the Ganache, Truffle and Metamask platforms. It was observed that the integration between the technologies is ensured and the communication between the parties works successfully in the test processes.

A blockchain-based approach to smart cargo transportation using UHF RFID

Providing transparency and trust among participants and stakeholders and ensuring an efficient operation are current supply chain challenges. These challenges are difficult to resolve because the records of supply chains may be exposed to alterations by participants. Blockchain technology has been identified as a promising solution to resolve these challenges. In this paper, we introduce blockchain and survey recent blockchain frameworks that address some of the supply chain challenges. We describe the components and operation of these blockchain frameworks. We identify the objectives and motivation in each of the surveyed use cases and highlight the advantages and disadvantages of each adopted framework. We analyze how the reported blockchain frameworks address different supply chain challenges. We present a comparative summary of existing literature on blockchain for supply chain. We also summarize the properties of a blockchain framework for its successful adoption in future supply chains and discuss several remaining challenges and opportunities.

/pdf/how-blockchain-enhances-supply-chain-management-a-survey-39leon7sim.pdf

How Blockchain Enhances Supply Chain Management: A Survey

Scrutinizing blockchain applicability in sustainable supply chains through an integrated fuzzy multi-criteria decision making framework

One of the major areas of interest for deployment of blockchains is in the supply chain sector where decentralisation combined with immutability is expected to enhance the transparency and robustness of transaction processing drastically. In this work we contribute to a feasibility study for permissioned blockchains in the context of a major international retail company. First, we characterise the types, relationships, and volumes of events that are created in the life cycle of a product from creation to ownership transfer. We use the created event model and the data from the company operations to identify the load that such an event processing system would have to manage. Then we create a prototype based on Quorum that deals with a significant subset of the events and expose the blockchain-based prototype to variations in load to identify the maximum throughput and average transaction processing time. This system can then form the basis of understanding the bottlenecks, configuration settings and platform choices needed in future potential deployment.

Blockchain-based event processing in supply chains—A case study at IKEA

Establishing traceability in global supply chains is a complicated problem. Current solutions for achieving traceability are expensive or imperfect, and give rise to organizational and trust-relate ...

Tobias Sund

Papers

Blockchain-based event processing in supply chains—A case study at IKEA

Performance Evaluation of a Blockchain-based Traceability System : A Case Study at IKEA