Scalable and Socially Inspired Blockchain Architecture for the Organic Food Supply Chain

  • Thanushya Thanujan University of Kelaniya
  • Dr. Chathura Rajapaksha University of Kelaniya
  • Dr. D.N. Wickramarachchi University of Kelaniya
Abstract views: 326 , PDF downloads: 325
Keywords: Blockchain, Hybrid consensus mechanisms, community-level trust, participatory guarantee systems

Abstract

Organic food supply chains are faced with heavy pressure to increase their output to meet the global demand. This confronts various challenges including scandals, adulteration, contamination, and growing regulations. As an alternative to third-party certification, Participatory Guarantee Systems (PGS) are popular community-based quality assurance system that integrates the social verification context into the organic certification process. As PGS is a local community-driven system, it has inherent limitations in the scalability of reaching consensus as the size of participants increases. The organic food industry has the potential to grow globally therefore, an appropriate scalable consensus mechanism is needed to deal with community-level consensus as an alternative to the existing PGS system. Blockchain architecture with hybrid consensus mechanisms seems to be the potential solution to address the trust and scalability issues in the organic food supply chain. This paper proposes a socially inspired hybrid blockchain architecture for the organic food supply chain to address the scalability issues via hybridizing two consensuses’ mechanisms with the combined advantages of Proof of Authority (PoA) and Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA). In the proposed architecture, much eminent aspect of community-level trust is integrated into the consensus process. Furthermore, this paper presents a concept-level validation as a qualitative analysis of the proposed architecture based on experts’ opinions. Concept-level validation of the proposed model acknowledged that, in the context of social verification, the credibility of the organic products would be enhanced, and hybridization of the consensuses would mitigate the scalability issues.

Author Biographies

Thanushya Thanujan, University of Kelaniya

Thanushya Thanujan received B.Sc (Special) in Computer Science at Vavuniya Campus of the University of Jaffna and M.Sc in Computer Science at the University of Peradeniya. Since 2016 she has been working as a lecturer (Prob.) in the Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Applied Science, Trincomalee Campus. Her research interests are Blockchain Technology, Internet of Things, Graph Theory Image Processing and Network Security.

Dr. Chathura Rajapaksha , University of Kelaniya

Chathura Rajapakse is a senior lecturer attached to the Department of Industrial Management, Faculty of Science, University of Kelaniya. He is an alumna of the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan from where he received a Doctor of Engineering degree in Computational Intelligence and Systems Science in March 2015. He also possesses a Master of Engineering degree from the same university as well as a B.Sc. (Special) degree
in Industrial Management from the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka. He is conducting research on smart and intelligent information systems since 2009.

Dr. D.N. Wickramarachchi , University of Kelaniya

Dilani Wickramaarachchi is a senior lecturer attached to the Department of Industrial Management, Faculty of
Science, University of Kelaniya. She is an alumna of the La Trobe University, Australia from where she received her PhD in Software Engineering in March 2015. She also possesses a Master of Science in Computer Science degree from the University of Colombo School of Computing(UCSC), Sri Lanka, as well as a B.Sc. (Special) degree in Industrial Management from the University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka. Her research interests are in
Global Software Engineering, Human learning through co-creation, Software code quality improvement, Computational thinking and Digital innovation.

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Published
2022-12-23