Blockchain for consortium: A practical paradigm in agricultural supply chain system

Abstract Trading aspect of agricultural supply chain system is sophisticated since it consists of many stages and involves various entities/agencies. Recently, blockchain technology could prove its effectiveness to solve some of the concerns in agricultural supply chain systems. Nevertheless, maximizing profit for producers (in our study farmers) is another important concern that can be addressed by consortium establishment which blockchain technology is the best solution for this purpose due to the following reasons. First, since all the nodes in the blockchain keep the verified and synchronized version of the chain, each node can verify the transactions’ transparency. Second, blockchain technology is temper-proof that means no one can change the history of the transactions. These two main features of blockchain technology can provide a suitable ground to construct a consortium among the producers. However, there are other specific requirements that a successful consortium in agricultural supply chain system should address them that motivate us to a new design of blockchain technology. More precisely, in our design we consider the problems of trustability, scalability, and share amount assignment. For trustability, we utilize cyber physical system to ensure the quantity and quality of the products. Scalability is being addressed by adopting the concept of public service platform and proposing a new consensus algorithm. And finally share amount assignment is being solved by our improved version of ant colony optimization algorithm. Experimental results and analysis prove the effectiveness and accuracy of our proposed design for blockchain technology.