Enhancing Product Traceability in Agricultural Supply Chain using Chain of Things Technology

Of late, digitalization and Blockchain Technology (BT) has fetched unfathomed revolutions in agricultural supply chains (ASC). BT can transform the way we communicate with other stakeholders in the supply chain. Assimilating decentralized and immutable records of BT with the potential reimbursements of Internet of Things (IoT) (henceforth called CoT (Chain of Things) technology) improves the efficiency of traceability system. The CoT technology ensures product traceability by accessing any or all product information and transactions using immutable records. It helps the stakeholders trace the quality of farming produces and improve food security. Despite the promises and market hype, the application of BT in traceability is still challenging due to limited scalability and transactional performance, security and privacy concerns, lack of organizational capabilities, deficiency of industry standards, etc. The proposed work aims to propose a CoT-based traceability system (CoT-TS) to alleviate the shortcomings of the prevailing traceability system including the feeble security system, the inept centralized database, and the easy-tampered traceability data. This cutting-edge technology is mainly appropriate for multi-stage traceability systems of the entire ASC from farming sites to consumer tables. The stakeholders of ASC can exchange more dependable quality and traceability data after implementing this CoT-TS in their supply chain. The proposed CoT-TS fetches the benefits of transparent, tamper-proof, and incontrovertible transactions integrated with decentralized monitoring and tracing operations. Thus, this research can help to increase the visibility of the ASC by designing and applying CoT-TS.