Blockchain-Based Solutions for Product Recall and Traceability Management in Supply Chain

Abstract

Product recall and traceability management are challenging problems that affect human lives and the safe operation of products in the supply chains. Product recalls can assist in removing potentially unsafe products from the marketplace and minimizing a company's responsibility for corporate negligence. Hence, monitoring and tracking each supply chain activity can assist system stakeholders in identifying the origins and causes of product and process defects. Today's systems and technologies leveraged for product recall and traceability management fall short in providing transparency, traceability, reliability, audit, security, and trust features. In this thesis, we propose blockchain-based solutions to overcome two different problems related to product recall and product traceability in two different supply chains. One is product recall management in the automotive supply chain and other one is product traceability management in the fishery supply chain. We employ the public Ethereum blockchain and integrate it with the decentralized storage of the Inter Planetary File System (IPFS) to deal with the large-sized data problem. We present the system architectures and algorithms explaining the working principles, information exchange flows, stakeholders' details, and sequential interactions. We discuss the implementation details, generalization aspects, and cost and security analyses to evaluate the performance of the proposed approaches. The proposed solutions are cost-effective, secure, and enable supply chain stakeholders to have end-to-end visibility of information during product recalls and product traceability. We make the smart contract codes publicly available on Github.

Date of Award	May 2022
Original language	American English