An Efficient Traceability Framework for Tobacco Market Supervision: High Compatibility Integration of RFID and Blockchain Technologies

Striking illicit trade like counterfeit tobacco and tobacco smuggling is a primary goal for tobacco control. The World Health Organization has outlined in the Tracking and Tracing Article of the Protocol to Eliminate Illicit Trade in Tobacco that tobacco products should possess unique identifiers to assist in the investigation of illegal trades. However, traditional methods of tobacco traceability in industrial processes rely on laser codes and QR codes as trace elements, which are highly susceptible to physical damage or tampering. The verification stage depends on manual identification and comparison of trace codes on the surface of the tobacco packs. These inefficient verification methods and fragile identification make it easy to disrupt the traceability path of tobacco products. Therefore, this study, based on a conceptual framework of traceability, integrates the Internet of Things and blockchain technology to design a tobacco supply chain traceability system. To improve the compatibility, the model integrates the feature of EPC and hash algorithm for seamless integration, meanwhile, a Merkle treebased verification method is proposed for off chain fast verification. In the experimental section, based on real-world data, the research conducted simulations comparing the distribution phase with traditional models by using agent-based system dynamics and conduct computational experiments for the supervision stage. The results demonstrate that our system significantly outperforms the baseline in efficiency and accuracy for tobacco tracing.