Creating a Traceable Product Story in Manufacturing Supply Chains Using IPFS

EasyChair Preprint 4653

Abstract

Evolving traceability requirements increasingly challenge manufacturing supply chain actors to collect tamper-proof and auditable evidence about what inputs they process, in what way these inputs are used, and what the resulting process product outputs are. Extant traceability solutions, based on blockchain technology, have shown ways to satisfy the requirements of creating a tamper-proof and auditable trail of traceability data. However, these existing solutions struggle to meet the increasing storage requirements necessary to create an evidence trail using manufacturing data. In this paper, we show a way to create a tamper-proof and auditable evolving product story that uses a decentralized file system called the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). We propose collecting manufacturing data and organizing these data into evidenced claims related to manufacturing. We also show how using linked data can help auditors derive a traceable product story from such an accumulating evidence trail. A comparative analysis shows that the solution proposed herein can complement existing blockchain-based traceability solutions to enable traceability in global manufacturing supply chains where forming a consortium incurs prohibitive costs.

Keyphrases: Blockchain, Decentralized Storage, Manufacturing Supply Chain, Traceability, product story

@booklet{EasyChair:4653,
  author    = {Peter Altmann and Abdul Ghafoor Abbasi and Olov Schelén and Karl Andersson and Morteza Alizadeh},
  title     = {Creating a Traceable Product Story in Manufacturing Supply Chains Using IPFS},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 4653},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2020}}