Blockchain-Driven and IoT-Assisted Chemical Supply-Chain Management

Blockchain (BC) technologies have gained prominence in the scientific and industrial sectors, as they have the potential to benefit a wide range of sectors. The shift is attributed owing to the key benefits of immutability, chronology, and ownership at every point in the supply chain. Thus, through BC, and smart contracts (SCs), every point in the supply chain can capture and exchange transactional data, and thus, it enables efficient and automated chain operations. Thus, BC adoption introduces traceability and transparency and lowers costs. Owing to the potential benefits of BC, promising solutions can be adopted in the chemical industry sector, where BC-based solutions can be potentially used to manage inventory management, to logistics, and ensure that fake chemicals are not sold by malicious entities, without the requirement for third-party validation or authorization. Moreover, chemical products can be assigned low-powered Internet-of-Things (IoT) digital tags that simplify the chemical inventory operations. Thus, in this paper, we propose a BC-based IoT-assisted reference architecture for chemical industries and present the entire supply-chain operation. To support the claim, a practical case study, ChemBlocks is presented, that presents the potential benefits of integration of IoT tagging on chemical products, with ledger state information managed via BC. At every supply-chain point, SCs are executed that automated the transfer of funds, and asset transfer is achieved. The proposed case study eliminates cost and effort duplication and increases the return of investment (ROI) of chemical industries.