A Smart Blockchain Model for Supply Chain Management System

Industry 4.0 is the creation of smart industrial processes. Therefore, supply chain management describes a chain of activities from the purchase of raw materials to the distribution of finished goods. The problems with the existing manual supply chain system include consistency, timeliness, traceability, security, and trust among all supply chain actors. This study presented the integration between a rule-based expert system and blockchain technology called SupplyOnBlock for supply chain management. The rule-based expert system was proposed to create smart industrial processes and blockchain technology to create fast, traceable, and secure supply chain processes. The rule-based expert system is to create a smart individual process in the supply chain while the blockchain is to coordinate the individual smart processes in a network of blockchains. The proposed SupplyOnBlock model for supply chain management is designed to use the public key cryptographic hash function for encryption of key processes to avoid non-repudiation at any point in the SupplyOnBlock. The information to be transferred on the block is first hashed into a value to compress its volume then the public key cryptography is used to encode and decode the hashed information. The proposed encryption scheme should be able to validate the legitimacy of the sender using the private key of the public key cryptography algorithm. The receiver should be able to validate the legitimacy of the sender using the public key of the public key cryptography algorithm.