Creating a Traceable Product Story in Manufacturing Supply Chains Using IPFS
Peter Altmann, Abdul Ghafoor Abbasi, Olov Schelén, Karl Andersson, Morteza Alizadeh · 2020
Evolving traceability requirements increasingly challenge manufacturing supply chain actors to collect tamperproof and auditable evidence about what inputs they process, in what way these inputs are used, and what the resulting process outputs are. 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, the 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 also show how using linked data can help auditors derive a traceable product story from such an accumulating evidence trail. The solution proposed herein can supplement existing blockchain-based traceability solutions and enable traceability in global manufacturing supply chains where forming a consortium incurs prohibitive costs and where storage requirements are high.