A Framework for the Blockchain and IoT-Based Supply Chain Management System

Abstract

Supply chain management (SCM) applications are being developed using blockchain technologies (BCT). This work proposes a blockchain and IoT-based supply chain system (BITS) framework to help create permanent records using smart contracts that can be shared and acted across a product supply chain in the SCM in a decentralized fashion. BITS ensures improved trust, security, transparency, and traceability among the participants aided with BCT and IoT. A demonstration of the data flow and the conceptual illustration of BITS is presented. Algorithms for node authorization and verification based on threshold values are presented. The framework has been rigorously tested for performance considering increasing malicious nodes and over various performance evaluation determining factors (i.e., computational power, memory consumption, time delay, and stability analysis based on the block arrival rate). BITS was evaluated by comparing its performance with consensus algorithm peers (i.e., PoW, PoS, and DPoS). Simulation study reveals the efficient performance of BITS under various test conditions.