A Traceable and Reliable Electronic Supply Chain System Based on Blockchain Technology

Abstract

Electronic supply chain (ESC) is a network among the parties of a supply chain system, such as manufacturers, suppliers, and retailers. It recodes all the processes involved in the distribution of specific products until transported to final customers. Blockchain (BC) technology is a decentralized network that records all the transactions in real-time and is used in many areas such as cryptocurrency. In this paper, we work on an ESC system that records all the transactions based on BC technology using a drug supply chain system as a case study. The recording of the transactions consists of three main stages. First, all the parties of the ESC system are represented in the BC network as clients with unique identities. Second, all the information related to a specific drug is recorded inside the transaction and each transaction has its own signature. Finally, all the transactions of the drug from the manufacture to the patient are recorded inside a block with a unique identity for each block. These steps inside the BC are performed based on security cryptography mechanisms, such as rivest-shamir-adleman (RSA) and secure hash algorithm SHA. The results illustrate that the proposed approach protects the drugs from counterfeiting, ensures the reliability, and provides a real-time tracking system for the transactions that have occurred among ESC parties.