Blockchain-based Forward Supply Chain and Waste Management for COVID-19
Medical Equipment and Supplies
Abstract
The year 2020 has witnessed unprecedented levels of demand for COVID-19
medical equipment and supplies. However, most of today’s systems,
methods, and technologies leveraged for handling the forward supply
chain of COVID-19 medical equipment and the waste that results from them
after usage are inefficient. They fall short in providing traceability,
reliability, operational transparency, security, and trust features.
Also, they are centralized that can cause a single point of failure
problem. In this paper, we propose a decentralized blockchain-based
solution to automate forward supply chain processes for the COVID-19
medical equipment and enable information exchange among all the
stakeholders involved in their waste management in a manner that is
fully secure, transparent, traceable, and trustworthy. We integrate the
Ethereum blockchain with decentralized storage of interplanetary file
systems (IPFS) to securely fetch, store, and share the data related to
the forward supply chain of COVID-19 medical equipment and their waste
management. We develop algorithms to define interaction rules regarding
COVID-19 waste handling and penalties to be imposed on the stakeholders
in case of violations. We present system design along with its full
implementation details. We evaluate the performance of the proposed
solution using cost analysis to show its affordability. We present the
security analysis to verify the reliability of the smart contracts, and
discuss our solution from the generalization and applicability point of
view. Furthermore, we outline the limitations of our solution in form of
open challenges that can act as future research directions. We make our
smart contracts code publicly available on GitHub.