ProChain: Provenance-Aware Traceability Framework for IoT-Based Supply Chain Systems

The current value of the world food system amounts to roughly $8 trillion, which represents approximately 10% of the global economies. Therefore, the quality of food and food products concerns not only all the end consumers but also millions of employees and entrepreneurs within the global food industry. Achieving the best possible quality of food throughout all the engaged processes requires constantly tracing and monitoring several crucial environmental conditions that may have a significant impact on the products' quality. The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is a system of dedicated sensors paired with the Internet that can overcome and prevent issues within the food industry. The interconnected elements bear the responsibility for monitoring, evaluating, and tracking the conditions where the food products undergo processing, and it checks the products' quality throughout their life cycle. Nevertheless, even IIoT has its challenges. The first such challenge relates to the storage and accessibility of the obtained data. What can make the data readily available to all individuals and entities involved in the industry? The second significant challenge relates to tracing items that pass through numerous processes involving different parties. This work proposed ProChain, a Provenance-aware Traceability Framework for IoT-based Supply Chain Systems. A proposed comprehensive framework of all the information acquired by the sensors and the complete set of provenance data addressed these challenges. Additionally, a thorough simulation of the proposed framework on the Raspberry PI 3B IoT device reviewed the ProChain efficiency in the cloud and local simulation environments. ProChain demonstrated tractability, transparency, and complex security as examples of the principal attributes of the IOTA 2.0 protocol in the food industry.

Automated summary

The global food system has significant economic value, making food quality crucial for consumers, employees, and entrepreneurs. The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) offers a solution to address issues in the food industry but faces challenges regarding data storage and item tracing. This paper proposes the ProChain framework, which utilizes provenance data to overcome these challenges.