Developing a blockchain-based smart contract data provenance tracking application within a smart manufacturing environment

Abstract

Data provenance across an end-to-end supply chain process refers to tracking the origin of every raw material, its processing, packaging, and distribution. Prior to reaching the end-user, a product usually goes through various suppliers and stages including processing, payment, manufacturing, and logistics. However, the origin and history of a product often remains centralised and unseen, making it difficult for the end-users to trace the product's journey. Centralisation has therefore been identified as a major challenge in achieving data provenance traceability across an end-to-end supply chain. This is because the traditional client-server architecture utilised in centralised systems stores data in a single location, making it vulnerable to single points of failure, data tampering, and unauthorised access. As a result, a lack of data provenance and standardisation for products in a manufacturing supply chain can occur, leading to a lack of traceability and transparency. Several authors have already proposed various solutions to address the challenge of data provenance traceability problems created by centralisation. However, there is still limited research on combating the centralisation in smart manufacturing and none when it comes to a cost-effective public blockchain platform. The current challenges that necessitated this study, stem from the limited research on how end-users can access critical data pertaining to the contents, composition, quantity and timestamp at time of packaging a product. The challenge of ensuring data provenance in a smart manufacturing environment can therefore be overcome by incorporating product data pertaining to the end-user order into a blockchain-based smart contract, making the data secure, immutable and traceable. This research study involves the development of a blockchain-based smart contract data provenance tracking application. To validate and demonstrate the developed solution, an experimental setup is utilised based on the case study of a water bottling plant. This is accomplished by firstly investigating the broader problem of data provenance traceability, and to identify a challenge described and establish the limitations that this research study intends to fill. This research study then goes on to determine the key factors that influence the choice of a blockchain platform for storing data provenance into smart contracts. It then compares the different blockchain platforms and identifies a cost-effective and suitable platform for this research study. The research study goes on to describe the proposed experimental setup that was developed to overcome this challenge and finally illustrates the results of the experiments. The results of this research study illustrate that centralisation, identified as a major challenge in achieving data provenance traceability, can be overcome by incorporating product data pertaining to the end-user order into a public blockchain-based smart contract, making the data secure, immutable and traceable. This allows the end-user to “read” data provenance through a tag on the bottled water for traceability and transparency. The findings of this research study can also contribute to the existing body of knowledge regarding data provenance traceability. This contribution has the potential to significantly reduce the scale of product recalls, from millions of units to only a few hundred, further highlighting the importance of this research study.