Towards a blockchain-based framework for traceability in compliance with GS1

Abstract

Traceability not only meets the social needs of product information transparency and reinforces the trust of consumers, but also meets the needs of enterprises for brand protection and enhances the competition in markets. Since a traceability system collects every necessary information at every stage in a supply chain, it is also an efficient tool for monitoring and optimizing the production procedure. Adopting information technology to digitalize the business process is an inevitable trend to improve the efficiency in information management and especially quickly detect fraud problems. However, with the digitized process via a computer software system, the challenge remains as to whether digitized data is real. The reality shows that changing digital data is easier than paper-based data. Thus, it is necessary to have a digitalized process and a secure mechanism for ensuring transparency, correctness, and consistency of data leading to more efficiency in incidents detection and trace problems tracing. An emerging technology, Blockchain, has attracted more attention after its great success in finance due to various dominant features in preventing data changes even from the internal system. Technically, Blockchain is a ledger that records the entire transaction history publicly on a network of peer-to-peer computers of the time. One common ledger will be shared among all collaborative organizations in an ecosystem to ensure data immutability and undeniable responsibility, thereby enhancing data transparency. Therefore, applying Blockchain technology in agriculture will improve the current traceability process, aiming to increase the responsibility of the objects in the process and transparency of information for consumers. In this paper, we propose a framework that utilizes Blockchain to robustize traceability systems. Additionally, our proposed framework is compliant with the GS1 standard to achieve high reliability and compatibility on a global scale.