A Distributed Software Agent-Oriented Traceability Milieu for Blockchain-Enabled Supply Chain

Supply chain is a potential area that can immensely benefit from blockchain technology (BCT), making supply chain operations more reliable, safer, traceable, and trustworthy for all its stakeholders. However, there are numerous challenges such as scalability, coordination, safety, and traceability-related issues which are yet to be resolved. Multi-agent systems (MAS) offer a completely new dimension for sustainability and operational traceability in distributed culture. MAS consists of an assembly of automated agents which can be deployed to track operational states both internally and externally in a distributed system. In this work, an effort has been made to develop a comprehensive traceability framework consisting of multiple agents for a large-scale product manufacturing supply chain enabled by blockchain technology. The agents are designed to monitor and drive the supply chain workflow to ensure traceability of the system. This framework can eliminate the limitations of the existing supply chains concerning traceability.