*.chain: automatic coding of smart contracts and user interfaces for supply chains

Blockchain, Internet of Things (IoT), and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are remarkable emerging technologies in the coming few decades. Blockchain technology makes the application more secure and transparent, AI offers analyses the application, and IoT makes the application connected, flexible, and efficient. This paper studies the literature, formulates the research question, and summarizes the contribution of blockchain application, particularly targeting AI and IoT in agriculture and healthcare sectors. This study reveals that 20% of papers are available in agriculture and 14% available in healthcare that integrates blockchain with IoT and AI. Furthermore, the objective of the paper is to study the role of blockchain with IoT and AI in agriculture and healthcare systems in light of the literature review. The integration of blockchain with IoT and AI are playing important roles in agriculture and healthcare fields to manage food supply chains, drug supply chains, traceability of products, smart contracts, monitoring the products, connected, and intelligent prediction.

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Blockchain and Smart Contracts: A Solution for Payment Issues in Construction Supply Chains

Informatics ◽

10.3390/informatics8020036 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 8 (2) ◽

pp. 36

Author(s):

Samudaya Nanayakkara ◽

Srinath Perera ◽

Sepani Senaratne ◽

Geeganage Thilini Weerasuriya ◽

Herath Mudiyanselage Nelanga Dilum Bandara

Keyword(s):

Supply Chain ◽

Supply Chains ◽

Construction Industry ◽

Primary Data ◽

Distributed Data ◽

Smart Contracts ◽

Blockchain Technology ◽

Smart Contract ◽

Industry Applications ◽

Financial Issues

The construction industry has dynamic supply chains with multiple suppliers usually engaged in short-term relationships. Government legislation, novel types of payment agreements, conventional information technology solutions, and supply chain management best practices have endeavoured to solve payment-related financial issues in the construction industry, which are mainly caused by the complexities of the construction supply chain. Nevertheless, payment-related issues persist as one of the key challenges in the industry. Applications of blockchain technology–a trusted, distributed data storing mechanism–along with smart contracts are gaining focus as solutions for complex interorganisational processes. A smart contract is a self-executing script that codifies a set of rules or agreements between multiple parties and runs across the blockchain network. This paper identifies the suitability of blockchain and smart contract technologies in solving payment issues in the construction industry. An expert forum of construction industry stakeholders served as the primary data collection method through a structured questionnaire. The key finding of the paper is that blockchain and smart contract powered solutions can significantly mitigate the payment and related financial issues in the construction industry, including partial payments, nonpayments, cost of finance, long payment cycle, retention, and security of payments.

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Blockchain and Smart Contracts for Entrepreneurial Collaboration in Maritime Supply Chains

Transport and Telecommunication Journal ◽

10.2478/ttj-2019-0030 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 20 (4) ◽

pp. 365-378 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Robert Philipp ◽

Gunnar Prause ◽

Laima Gerlitz

Keyword(s):

Supply Chains ◽

Business Processes ◽

Process Time ◽

Smart Contracts ◽

Entry Barriers ◽

Expert Interviews ◽

Blockchain Technology ◽

Collaborative Logistics ◽

Research Questions ◽

Enforcement Costs

Abstract Smart contracts are scripts on the top of the blockchain technology. They represent a form of automation by what the layers of intermediaries can be reduced or even completely replaced. Accordingly, blockchain smart contracting systems decrease transaction and enforcement costs as well as process time. Moreover, we argue, blockchain and smart contracts can facilitate cross-organisational collaboration and their underlying business processes. Hence, they are able to support the integration of entrepreneurs and SMEs into trans-national supply chains by reducing high entry barriers and weakening the dominating position of big players. This paper discusses the research questions how blockchain smart contracting can facilitate the implementation of collaborative logistics structures and how the integration of SMEs into sustainable maritime supply chains can be safeguarded. The research bases on expert interviews and case studies. The results showcase the potentials of using blockchain smart contracting in the environment of trans-national and multimodal supply chains.

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Smart Contracts for Sustainable Supply Chain Management: Conceptual Frameworks for Supply Chain Maturity Evaluation and Smart Contract Sustainability Assessment

Frontiers in Blockchain ◽

10.3389/fbloc.2021.506436 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 4 ◽

Author(s):

Wolfram Groschopf ◽

Mario Dobrovnik ◽

Christian Herneth

Keyword(s):

Supply Chain ◽

Supply Chain Management ◽

Supply Chains ◽

Organizational Development ◽

Sustainability Assessment ◽

Legal Aspects ◽

Smart Contracts ◽

Sustainable Supply Chain ◽

Chain Management ◽

Trade Offs

Current research on smart contracts focuses on technical, conceptual, and legal aspects but neglects organizational requirements and sustainability impacts. We consider this a significant research gap and explore the relationship between smart contracts and sustainability in supply chains. First, we define the concept of smart contracts in terms of supply chain management. Then, we conduct a content analysis of the literature to explore the overlapping research fields of smart contracts and sustainability in supply chains. Next, we develop a semi-structured assessment framework to model the potential environmental and social impacts induced by smart contracts on supply chains. We propose a conceptual framework for supply chain maturity by mapping the relationships between organizational development, sustainability, and technology. We identify smart contracts as a foundational technology that enables efficient and transparent governance and collaborative self-coordination of human and non-human actors. Thus, we argue that smart contracts can contribute to the economic and social development of networked value chains and Society 5.0. To stimulate interdisciplinary research on smart contracts, we conclude the article by formulating research propositions and trade-offs for smart contracts in the context of technology development, business process and supply chain management, and sustainability.

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Tamper-Proof Volume Tracking in Supply Chains with Smart Contracts

Lecture Notes in Computer Science - Euro-Par 2018: Parallel Processing Workshops ◽

10.1007/978-3-030-10549-5_29 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 367-378 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Ulrich Gallersdörfer ◽

Florian Matthes

Keyword(s):

Supply Chains ◽

Smart Contracts

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Development of a reliable supply chain system using blockchain

Journal of Intelligent & Fuzzy Systems ◽

10.3233/jifs-189156 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 39 (6) ◽

pp. 8377-8387

Author(s):

Srinivasan Ananthanarayanan Bragadeesh ◽

Arumugam Umamakeswari

Keyword(s):

Supply Chain ◽

Supply Chains ◽

Food Product ◽

Reputation Systems ◽

Batch Size ◽

Supply Chain Network ◽

Smart Contracts ◽

Supply Chain System ◽

Distributed Structure ◽

Trading Model

Traceability and food quality are significant challenges in realizing a reliable food supply chain. The reliability of data in supply chains is one of the critical factors. Ensuring transparency, integrity, and availability is the primary requirement for establishing a proper supply chain network. Blockchain is a distributed structure of immutable records that are chained together to form blocks. It provides a guarantee of storing the data correctly and reliably. Smart contracts, which are self-executing contracts containing the terms of the agreement between the entities involved, provide utility for automation of reputation calculation with the transactions. Reputation systems allow participants to rate each other, thus building trust through reputation. The present reputation systems have bounded scrutiny and lack granularity; hence they are not ideal for supply chains. In this work, we propose a reliable supply chain framework using blockchain and smart contracts. It uses a consortium blockchain network to trace communication between the participants and to calculate reputation scores dynamically. Rewards and penalties are assigned to the participants of the supply chain network based on the food product quality involved in the trade. The network participants have defined roles and the access permissions govern who can access the ledger. An immutable ledger stores all the transactions occurring in the network. Any change in one block will reflect in the consecutive blocks, which ensures the data is reliable and secure. The proposed system is implemented using Hyperledger Composer. The proposed framework is evaluated in terms of throughput and latency for varying asset size and batch size using the benchmarking tool Caliper. Results show that the security and reliability provided by the proposed framework justify the overheads in contrast to a trading model that does not include a blockchain network.

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Intelligent Smart Contracts for Innovative Supply Chain Management

Frontiers in Blockchain ◽

10.3389/fbloc.2020.535787 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 3 ◽

Author(s):

Paolo Bottoni ◽

Nicola Gessa ◽

Gilda Massa ◽

Remo Pareschi ◽

Hesham Selim ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Supply Chain ◽

Supply Chain Management ◽

Supply Chains ◽

Common Good ◽

Smart Contracts ◽

Chain Management ◽

Contractual Relationships ◽

Efficiency And Effectiveness ◽

Economic Perspectives ◽

State Of Affairs

We propose blockchains and smart contracts as enabling technologies for an innovative type of supply chain management, with the goal of achieving higher levels of collaboration between the companies participating in the chain, which in turn pays in the form of higher levels of profitability and economic health for the participating enterprises. Our proposal goes far beyond simply using blockchains as decentralized systems to track the origin and delivery of goods, which is what most of the current blockchain projects on supply chains are focused on. In fact, we introduce a type of smart contract aimed to solve two of the main problems that hinder the efficiency and effectiveness of supply chains, namely trust and coordination. Solving the problem of trust amounts to the capability of establishing quickly and cheaply contractual relationships based on convergent business needs among parties that may not know each other, and therefore need to protect themselves from opportunistic or incorrect behavior. Solving the problem of coordination consists in creating, at convenient management costs, a control system capable of directing the objectives of the supply chain as a whole, so as to achieve a greater common good in the medium term, as an alternative to the state of affairs in which each participant pursues, on its own behalf, lower but immediate returns. Our smart contracts for innovative supply chain management replace human coordinators in tackling the problems above, thus eliminating one major obstacle to their effective solution, namely the need to trust the coordinator itself. Furthermore, in this way, by automating the process of coordination, they unburden the supply chain of a considerable management cost. Contracts of this kind not only automate contract execution as in standard smart contracts, but also adjust costs and compensations of the members of a supply chain, effectively taking up the role that was of human coordinators. Thus, we refer to them as “intelligent smart contracts.” In the course of the paper, we will illustrate an innovative supply chain architecture based on intelligent smart contracts running on blockchain, we will detail the algorithmic methodologies underlying the decision-making process of these contracts and we will outline the wider socio-economic perspectives opened by our approach.

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