Design and Deployment of IoT enabled Blockchain based resilient Supply-chain Management System using Ethereum

Abstract

With exponential growth of digital consumer purchasing behavior and the increasing implementation of IoT in retail industry, it has become imperative to provide secure, scalable, and manageable data models to the complex interconnected supply chain management systems. Blockchain technology in recent times has huge potential for deployment of secured data framework over a distributed architecture. In this paper, we have proposed a resilient Supply-Chain Management (SCM) system using Ethereum-based blockchain deployment on a distributed computing test-bed. An IoT-based Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) method is used in our use-case prototype for product information tracking at functional nodes (Manufacturers, Distributors, Retailers and Consumers) of SCM implementation. We have implemented EthereumTM based blockchain using SolidityTM smart contracts with the help of RemixTM Web-based Integrated Development Environment (IDE). A python-based PyAutoGui is used for automation in blockchain deployment at multiple functional nodes distributed across the supply chain. As proof of concept, we have created a test-bed having 28 Oracle virtual machines (VMs) using Linux for successful implementation and validation of our proposed blockchain based SCM system. We have presented comprehensive results showing Ethereum-blockchain containing complete product information, transactions and tracking for secured information access with distributed digital ledger technology on our test-bed implementation.