An Empirical Review of Blockchain Models for Supply Chain Management from an Analytical Perspective

Supply chain management (SCM) involves design of multiple processes which includes procurement of goods, manufacturing, warehousing, transportation, distribution and selling to customer. Each of these steps requires design & development of secure product tracking, privacy preservation, transparent transaction handling, trust modelling and distributed processing operations. These operational characteristics can be directly mapped with blockchains, because they provide transparency, traceability, immutability, and distributed mining operations. Thus, blockchains are quickly gaining popularity as one of the most favorable solutions for SCM modelling. In order to model SCM, a wide variety of blockchain-based solutions are proposed by researchers over the years, and each of these solutions vary in terms performance parameters. These parameters include, response time, scalability, security level, delay to add a new block, cost of deployment, and computational complexity. Due to such a wide variety of algorithmic availability, it becomes ambiguous for SCM designers to select the best blockchain models for a given application. In order to reduce this ambiguity, a survey of recently proposed blockchain models for SCM application are discussed in this text. Most of these models are based on machine learning, and are characterized on the basis of their nuances, advantages, limitations, and possible future research scopes. Upon referring this descriptive review, readers would be able to summarize characteristics for each SCM implementation, and identify the best suited models for their deployments. This text also compares the reviewed models in terms of statistical parameters like delay of block mining, searching time for SCM transaction, security level, computational complexity, and probable use cases. These performance metrics are compared across different models in order to estimate the best performing models for a given blockchain application. After referring this comparison, researchers will be able identify most optimum model & their configuration for application-specific SCM deployments. Furthermore, this text also recommends various methods to improve performance of the reviewed models in order to apply them for real-time deployments.