Framework for Document Traceability in Chemical Supply Chain Using Blockchain and Smart Contracts

Abstract In today’s world, 96% of all goods depend on chemicals. Chemical industry plays vital role in supply chain. Chemical supply chain consists of multiple stakeholders including raw material suppliers to end user customers. Based on regulations, several product documents are needed to be supplied with the chemicals till the end of the life cycle. Blockchain based document traceability offers a viable solution to create a decentralized distributed shared platform for a secure, immutable, transparent, permanent, trustworthy, and accountable system for all the stakeholders involved. In this paper, an overview of the document traceability, current challenges and envisage how Blockchain and smart contracts address those challenges are presented. Based on the analysis, it is proposed to use using Hyperledger Fabric, an open-source private blockchain to meet the document traceability requirements such as security, privacy, scalability, authentication, and authorization. The proposed Blockchain architecture provides a feasible solution to build and deploy an end-to-end decentralized application in the chemical supply chain industry for document traceability.