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Blockchain Technology for Future Supply Chain Management

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A special issue of Systems (ISSN 2079-8954). This special issue belongs to the section "Supply Chain Management".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 April 2024 | Viewed by 8485

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Special Issue Editor

Prof. Dr. Hamid Jahankhani

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Guest Editor

Northumbria University, London Campus, London E1 7HT, UK
Interests: cybersecurity; ethics; blockchain; AI; cybercrime; supply chain; cloud computing; governance

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Over the years, the supply chain of custody has become increasingly complex as a result of massive globalization. Several factors including the addition of multiple partners or stages, potential security risks to products and services, the trustworthiness of processes, and the privacy of user data are critical factors that question the efficiency and management of existing systems. This necessitates the development of a single supply chain model by adopting recent technological advancements such as blockchain. Blockchain can heavily transform the behavior of the supply chain community to and allow it to adhere to all legitimate businesses requirements. Complementing blockchain with IoT would facilitate an acute awareness of supply chain transactions with complete traceability and auditing at each instance of time, from the past, present, or future. Furthermore, blockchain and AI are integral to each other as AI systems can help to analyze data, authenticate users, and improve the process efficiency of blockchain-based supply chain systems. Supply chain systems are also susceptible to potential security risks, where the adoption of a Cyber Security Maturity Model (CSSM) can safeguard blockchain-based supply chain systems across multiple industries from pharmaceutical and higher education to aviation and maritime. In fact, AI-enabled blockchain deployed on the cloud for supply chains using IoT for process optimization and CSSM as a security standard may serve as a foundation for an efficient supply chain across different sectors of industry.

This Special Issue invites scientific contributions proposing new, innovative, and original approaches, review works, case studies, and evaluations of the existing commercial blockchain-assisted supply chain solutions. This issue aims to provide an opportunity for academics and practitioners to share their theoretical and practical knowledge in the field, with the aim to move the state-of-the-art and the state-of-the-practice forward. This Special Issue particularly focuses on, but is not limited to, articles addressing the following:

Resilient, transparent, and trusted supply chains;
Authenticity and mitigation of counterfeit products;
Blockchain on the cloud for supply chains;
Responsible sourcing and better visibility to minimize disputes;
The role of the Cyber Security Maturity Model and governance in adopting blockchain for supply chains;
Blockchain and Self Sovereign Identity (SSI);
Supply chain transparency;
Power of artificial intelligence (AI) and supply chain management;
Supply chain synchronisation;
Supply chain cost optimisation;
Privacy-preserving customer authentication technologies;
Trust and legal implications;
AI-based price comparison models;
Resource sharing models;
The role of 5G and 6G, blockchain, and AI in future technologies;
Governance of higher education, pharmaceutical, aviation, and maritime supply chains;
Supply chain risk management and vulnerability;
Smart contracts and blockchain;
Combining NFC-authenticated tags with NFTs to spot counterfeit luxury products;
Cryptocurrency adoption for supply chains.

Prof. Dr. Hamid Jahankhani
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Systems is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

blockchain
cyberattacks
IoT
supply chain
smart contracts
AI
CSMM
trust
privacy
digital currency
digital transformation
cloud computing

Published Papers (3 papers)

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Research

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17 pages, 5141 KiB

Open AccessArticle

A Blockchain-Based Framework to Make the Rice Crop Supply Chain Transparent and Reliable in Agriculture

by Muhammad Shoaib Farooq, Shamyla Riaz, Ibtesam Ur Rehman, Muhammad Asad Khan and Bilal Hassan

Systems 2023, 11(9), 476; https://doi.org/10.3390/systems11090476 - 17 Sep 2023

Cited by 2 | Viewed by 2609

Abstract

Rice is one of the major food crops across the globe, and its quality and safety highly influence human health. It is the basis of many different products, including rice flour, rice bread, noodles, rice vinegar, and others. Therefore, the rice supply chain has garnered increasing attention due to the high demand for food safety. Furthermore, malpractices in the rice supply chain can impact farmers by generating low revenues despite their great efforts in rice cultivation. In addition, they would cause governments to suffer significant economic losses due to the high cost of importing rice crops from other countries during the off-season. These issues derive from the lack of reliability, trust, transparency, traceability, and security in the rice supply chain. In this research, we propose a secure, trusted, reliable, and transparent framework based on a Blockchain for rice crop supply chain’s traceability from farm to fork. A new crypto token, the Rice Coin (RC), is introduced to keep a record of all transactions between the stakeholders of the rice supply chain. Moreover, the proposed framework includes an economic model and a crypto wallet and introduces an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) for the RC. Based on smart contracts, a transaction processing system was developed for the transparency and traceability of rice crops, including the conversion of the RC to fiat currency. Furthermore, the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is proposed in this research to store encrypted data of companies, retailers, and farmers, so to increase data security, transparency, and availability. In the end, the experimental results showed a better performance of the proposed framework compared to already available supply chain solutions in terms of transaction verification time, transaction average gas cost, and new block latency. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Blockchain Technology for Future Supply Chain Management)

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24 pages, 1764 KiB

Open AccessArticle

NativeVRF: A Simplified Decentralized Random Number Generator on EVM Blockchains

by Warodom Werapun, Tanakorn Karode, Jakapan Suaboot, Tanwa Arpornthip and Esther Sangiamkul

Systems 2023, 11(7), 326; https://doi.org/10.3390/systems11070326 - 25 Jun 2023

Viewed by 3355

Abstract

Smart contracts refer to small programs that run in a decentralized blockchain infrastructure. The blockchain system is trustless, and the determination of common variables is done by consensus between peers. Developing applications that require generating random variables becomes significantly challenging—for instance, lotteries, games, and random assignments. Many random number generators (RNGs) for smart contracts have been developed for the decentralized environment. The methods can be classified into three categories: on-chain RNG, Verifiable Random Function (VRF), and the Commit–reveal scheme. Although the existing methods offer different strengths and weaknesses, none achieves the three important requirements for an ideal RNG solution: security, applicability, and cost efficiency. This paper proposes a novel RNG approach called Native VRF, which offers application development simplicity and cost efficiency while maintaining strong RNG security properties. Experimental results show that Native VRF has the same security properties as the widely used RNG methods, i.e., Randao and Chainlink VRF. On top of that, our work offers a much simpler setup process and lower hardware resources and developer expertise requirements. Most importantly, the proposed Native VRF is compatible with all Ethereum virtual machine (EVM) blockchains, contributing to the overall growth of the blockchain ecosystem. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Blockchain Technology for Future Supply Chain Management)

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Review

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24 pages, 14190 KiB

Open AccessReview

Beyond the Bitcoin Hype: A Structured Study of Blockchain’s Impact and Potential in Today’s Digital World

by Felipe Campos-Rojas, Matheus Franco and Vinicius Minatogawa

Systems 2023, 11(11), 549; https://doi.org/10.3390/systems11110549 - 14 Nov 2023

Viewed by 1545

Abstract

The development and application of blockchain-based technologies have been overshadowed by the performance of cryptocurrencies and the belief that these are all that this technology has to offer. This idea has led to the question on numerous occasions if this technology is just expectations or if there are indeed applications that solve problems in today’s world. This bibliometric study on the current state of blockchain applications in the context of digital transformation seeks to break down the myth that this technology is just expectations, synthesizing and ordering the wide variety of topics that arise from this relationship. The results showed that the development of blockchain in the context of digital transformation is growing at an exponential rate, and with this, its applications have come to cover a large part of the industries, interact with other technologies, and establish objectives of all kinds. Based on these topics of technologies, industries, operational objectives, and strategic objectives, a structure is proposed that will serve as a guide for the development of new solutions to some problems, research, applications, and integrations with other technologies. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Blockchain Technology for Future Supply Chain Management)

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