Reputation and Trust Management in Gem Supply Chains using Blockchain

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