Preparing construction supply chains for blockchain technology:An investigation of its potential and future directions

Blockchain, a peer-to-peer, controlled, distributed database structure, has the potential to profoundly affect current business transactions in the construction industry through smart contracts, cryptocurrencies, and reliable asset tracking. The construction industry is often criticized for being slow in embracing emerging technologies and not effectively diffusing them through its supply chains. Often, the extensive fragmentation, traditional procurement structures, destructive competition, lack of collaboration and transparency, low-profit margins, and human resources are shown as the main culprits for this. As blockchain technology makes its presence felt strongly in many other industries like finance and banking, this study investigates the preparation of construction supply chains for blockchain technology through an explorative analysis. Empirical data for the study were collected through semistructured interviews with 17 subject experts. Alongside presenting a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats analysis (SWOT), the study exhibits the requirements for and steps toward a construction supply structure facilitated by blockchain technology

Barriers to the Adoption of Blockchain Technology in Business Supply Chains: A Total Interpretive Structural Modelling (TISM) approach

Blockchain is an emerging technology with a wide array of potential applications. This technology, which underpins cryptocurrency, provides an immutable, decentralised, and transparent distributed database of digital assets for use by firms in supply chains. However, not all firms are appropriately suited to adopt blockchain in the existing supply chain primarily due to their lack of knowledge on the benefits of this technology. Using Total Interpretive Structural Modelling (TISM) and Cross-Impact Matrix Multiplication Applied to Classification (MICMAC), this paper identifies the adoption barriers, examines the interrelationships between them to the adoption of blockchain technology, which has the potential to revolutionise supply chains. The TISM technique supports developing a contextual relationship based structural model to identify the influential barriers. MICMAC classifies the barriers in blockchain adoption based on their strength and dependence. The results of this research indicate that the lack of business awareness and familiarity with blockchain technology on what it can deliver for future supply chains, are the most influential barriers that impede blockchain adoption. These barriers hinder and impact businesses decision to establish a blockchain-enabled supply chain and that other barriers act as secondary and linked variables in the adoption process

A new product anti‐counterfeiting blockchain using a truly decentralized dynamic consensus protocol

The growth of counterfeit goods has plagued the international community for decades. Nowadays, the battle against counterfeiting remains a significant challenge. Most of the current anti‐counterfeiting systems are centralized. Motivated by the evolution of blockchain technology, we propose (Block‐Supply), a decentralized anti‐counterfeiting supply chain that exploits NFC and blockchain technologies. This paper also proposes a new truly decentralized consensus protocol that, unlike most of the existing protocols, does not require PoW and randomly employs a different set of different size of validators each time a new block is proposed. Our protocol utilizes a game theoretical model to analyze the risk likelihood of the block\u27s proposing nodes. This risk likelihood is used to determine the number of validators involved in the consensus process. Additionally, the game model enforces the honest consensus nodes\u27 behavior by rewarding honest players and penalizing dishonest ones. Our protocol utilizes a novel, decentralized, dynamic mapping between the nodes that participate in the consensus process. This mapping ensures that the interaction between these nodes is executed anonymously and blindly. This way of mapping withstands many attacks that require knowing the identities of the participating nodes in advance, such as DDoS, Bribery, and Eclipse attacks