Abstract

Nowadays, creating a blockchain-based system for supply chain tracing is a complex task. This paper defines a model, a graphical domain specific language, and a set of tools aimed at helping supply chain domain experts to create blockchain based tracing systems for their supply chains. Starting from a graphical representation of the supply chain, the solidity smart contracts implementing the related tracing system are automatically generated by our framework. Small interventions of programmers are required to customize and finalize such smart contracts. A set of web based interfaces to interact with such smart contracts are also automatically generated. We are confident that our results will increase blockchain usage for supply chain traceability thanks to the automatic process of smart contract generation.

Introduction

A Supply Chain (SC1) has been defined in [1] as an organizations network involved in different processes and activities with the aim of producing value (products or services) at the benefit of the ultimate consumer. Focusing on the product/service, an SC represents a sequence of (even complex) operations which transform the initial assets into intermediate products/services and then into the final one.

In order to give a more precise definition of an SC, it is necessary to understand which aspects of the products/services and which operations are under analysis, the type of process represented, and the actors operating in the network. Regardless of the specific process represented by the SC, having the capability of automatically tracing and controlling the actions performed by the actors of the SC is of paramount importance to obtain an effective and efficient process. Auditability is a fundamental feature of such a tracing system, assuring that the records tracing the actions that have been performed on the SC assets must be always available and that they cannot be deleted or altered.

Supply Chain Management (SCM) systems are software systems that allow to follow and record the execution of the steps of the process represented by a given SC [2], [3]. A number of SCM system implementations, both from academy and industry, are currently available.234 A commonly used approach to have auditable SCM systems is to implement them over blockchain infrastructures.

A number of blockchain-based solutions tailored for SCs [4], [5], [6], [7] are already available but, according to the researchers proposing them, such solutions are still focused on a specific scenario and very difficult to be generalized. Consequently, to promote the usage of blockchain technology for SC tracing and with the aim to make the SCM systems development easier and usable by supply chain domain experts, who are not necessarily distributed ledger technology experts as well, we propose the *-chain framework.

Conclusion and future work

We presented *-chain, a framework defining a model, a DSL, and a set of tools for helping supply chain domain experts in designing and developing their supply chain Management Systems on top of blockchain technology. Our framework allows domain experts to easily represent the main types of supply chains through a simple and user-friendly graphical interface, and – once designed – to translate such supply chain scheme into: (i) a set of smart contracts skeletons implementing the related supply chain Management System, and (ii) two web interfaces for operating on such management system: one for the supply chain administrator, and the other for the supply chain participants. These interfaces allow supply chain administrators to register the participants to their Supply Chain Management systems assigning them roles and rights, and supply chain participants to the register the operations they executed on assets according to the designed supply chain and to the required roles.

We validated our framework, by using it to represent a well-known supply chain use case: the soybean traceability study case [7]. We built the corresponding model, adding more detail to the original schema, introducing role-based authorization controls and also other constraints on operations. We used our framework to translate the supply chain schema into solidity code, and to produce the supply chain Administrator and Participants interfaces.