Enhanced Inventory Management Using Blockchain Technology Under Cloud Sector Enabled by Hybrid Multi-Verse with Whale Optimization Algorithm

Abstract

Inventory cost control is an essential factor in supply chain management. If the supplier’s inventory is insufficient, then the chance to trade the product will be reduced. The manufacturer’s inadequate material inventory will have an effect in termination of production, delays, and a waste of resources and time. On the other hand, postponed transportation will certainly raise costs such as transportation costs and cancellation of orders. Therefore, the operation costs of enterprises will be more, which will lower profits. In conventional supply chains, inventory costs control is not feasible for the view of the entire supply chain. The main intent of this paper is to plan for intelligent inventory management using blockchain technology under the cloud sector. The inventory management of the supply chain includes “multiple suppliers, a manufacturer, and multiple distributors”. The proposed inventory management models consider some significant costs like “transaction cost, inventory holding cost, shortage cost, transportation cost, time cost, setup cost, backordering cost, and quality improvement cost”. This multi-objective cost function is minimized by a novel hybrid optimization algorithm; the concept of WOA is integrated to produce the new algorithm which is termed as Whale-based Multi Verse Optimization (W-MVO) algorithm. For securing the data of distributors, using blockchain technology in a cloud environment helps from the leakage of data to other unauthorized users. Once the cost is reduced in all aspects based on the proposed hybrid optimization algorithm, the distributer will store the concerning data in the blockchain under the cloud sector, where each distributer holds a hash function to store its data, which cannot be restored by the other distributers. The valuable performance analysis over the conventional optimization algorithms proves the effective and reliable performance of the proposed model over the conventional models.