Abstract:
Supply chains today generally face many complex challenges when focusing
on traceability, provenance, trust and integrity. When applied to gem industry, users’ requirement for originality of produce and its worth, industry
players’ requirement for greater transparency, and lack of effective legislation
to achieve this has been of concern. This work aims to facilitate corporate
responsibility for due diligence and improvement in gem supply chain man agement. Evolution and application of blockchain technology here addresses
the inherent issues of transparency in supply chains. Blockchain provides an
immutable trail of all transactions taking place in a supply chain. However,
trust itself cannot be established for the associated data in totality. A trust
management framework is proposed as a mechanism to address the trust challenge in blockchain enabled gem supply chains. We propose a multi-layered
architecture over blockchain for managing trust in gem supply chain. Our
novel approach ensures credible end product at the retailers’ end in terms of
proofs of location, custody and assessment. The trust management in our
solution also involves the reputation management of traders. We have also
automated the reputation score calculation using smart contracts. Our proposed solution can help stimulate a fair pricing mechanism as future work
that can be based on the trust level associated with the end product and the
reputation of the seller. Our architecture is developed using Hyperledger,
and is supported by shared network model which ensures scalability and
provenance with minimal overhead
