Certitex: a Textile Certified Supply Chain

• Autor(a) principal: Brandão, Miguel Alexandre Torrão Alves
• Data de Publicação: 2020
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.6/11012
• topic: Análise de Séries Temporais; Armazenamento de Dados; Blockchain; Machine Learning; Quorum; Domínio/Área Científica::Engenharia e Tecnologia::Engenharia Eletrotécnica, Eletrónica e Informática

The appearance of blockchain technologies and their growth and development have led to the exploration of applications of the technology in new areas, in addition to the original, cryptocurrencies, areas such as product management and traceability in supply chains are being explored. Initially, this technology was explored with the aim of providing food supply chains with traceability and transparency for the consumer. Currently, solutions for a larger variety of supply chains are being studied and developed. Current studies have proven that the technology has powerful properties to promote traceability and nonrepudiation of information related to products in a supply chain, as well as providing liability of entities for damages caused to products, which in the past has been notoriously difficult. The current structure of these supply chains, several different entities located in different physical spaces, is prone to the application of blockchain solutions as it also fits the architecture of the technology itself. All of this leads to a strong interest in applying blockchain technology to supply chains. Unfortunately, all the blockchain based solutions found to solve similar problems in the research phase of this project were developed by private entities, with little to no divulgation about their development and many times not even about how they function. This led to this project being mainly about researching the base technology and developing a solution from scratch. The problems of currently used traditional solutions are related to the use of non-standardized information registration strategies and ease of repudiation of information, but current consumer demands for knowledge of the origin of products has led to the exploration of new solutions to overcome this. Additionally, it is common for products, at the end of their production cycle, to be damaged and it is practically impossible to locate where the damage occurred in the chain. The idea of adapting blockchain technology as a solution for product traceability in the supply chain presents some points of concern, as blockchains are generally associated with distributed and public systems to maintain a given cryptocurrency, thus making information public. Although this is the initial purpose of its creation, other blockchain technologies oriented to data storage in a business to business model have emerged. These blockchains have access control measures, and are therefore called private. Only allowing access by a select group of entities. Additionally, information stored on a blockchain is also often associated with high costs, and when we refer to public blockchains like Ethereum this is a reality, but by using private solutions we can mitigate this cost. It is also often a concern the computational costs associated with cryptocurrency blockchains like Bitcoin and Etherum. Again, it is possible to get around this limitation by using private solutions where we can use more light weight algorithms, because the environment in which the system will be inserted, does not benefit from the properties of such algorithms. With the usage of blockchain to certify and record the progress of products as they travel through the supply chain, it is also interesting to explore the collected data, and how it could be used to make the supply chain itself more efficient. The purpose of this dissertation is to study how blockchain technology can be combined with a supply chain to offer product traceability and information collection. To achieve this goal, a prototype of a blockchain-based application was developed to collect data in a supply chain, as well as a prototype of an application for remote viewing of the data entered and a prototype of a Machine Learning module able to make use of the information collected by the blockchain.