A PHARMACEUTICAL SUPPLY CHAIN TRACEABILITY SYSTEM BASED ON BLOCKCHAIN AND SMART CONTRACT

摘要

Recently, blockchain and smart contract are receiving a growing amount of attention from researchers on supply chain. The advantages of blockchain and smart contract include decentralization, tamper-proof and data sharing, which not only provide trust between merchants and help with traceability management, but also ensure the authenticity of drugs. However, the current pharmaceutical supply chain systems are mostly developed using a centralized structure, where data sharing cannot be well achieved, and trust between merchants cannot be well solved too. Therefore, some challenges, such as replacement or loss of drugs during transportation and difficulty in traceability, are existing. In this respect, we design a pharmaceutical supply chain traceability system using blockchain and smart contract. This system uses Internet of things (IoT) technology such as barcode to reduce human errors and speed up the transactions. It is able to real-time share the information about drug and merchant. With the information sharing, this system provides a possible solution to identity management, improves the efficiency of regulatory departments by acknowledging the performer behind each action, and additionally determines the time and content of each transaction. Therefore, it is more conducive to traceability management and authenticity of drug.