The year 2020 has witnessed unprecedented levels of demand for COVID-19 medical equipment and supplies. However, most of today's systems, methods, and technologies leveraged for handling the forward supply chain of COVID-19 medical equipment and the waste that results from them after usage are inefficient. They fall short in providing traceability, reliability, operational transparency, security, and trust features. Also, they are centralized that can cause a single point of failure problem. In this paper, we propose a decentralized blockchain-based solution to automate forward supply chain processes for the COVID-19 medical equipment and enable information exchange among all the stakeholders involved in their waste management in a manner that is fully secure, transparent, traceable, and trustworthy. We integrate the Ethereum blockchain with decentralized storage of interplanetary file systems (IPFS) to securely fetch, store, and share the data related to the forward supply chain of COVID-19 medical equipment and their waste management. We develop algorithms to define interaction rules regarding COVID-19 waste handling and penalties to be imposed on the stakeholders in case of violations. We present system design along with its full implementation details. We evaluate the performance of the proposed solution using cost analysis to show its affordability. We present the security analysis to verify the reliability of the smart contracts, and discuss our solution from the generalization and applicability point of view. Furthermore, we outline the limitations of our solution in form of open challenges that can act as future research directions. We make our smart contracts code publicly available on GitHub. INDEX TERMS Blockchain, Ethereum, COVID-19, security analysis, forward supply chain, medical waste management.
Spare parts are essential assets to maintain productivity and operations. A spare part is used for the repair or replacement of failed units. Tracing and tracking of spare parts ownership can help to ensure reliable outcomes in terms of manufacturing operations and service delivery. However, today's spare part inventory systems fall short of providing reliable tracing and tracking of spare parts ownership which poses serious threats to their authenticity. Also, current approaches and systems leveraged for spare part inventory management are vulnerable to the single point of failures. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based smart contract to trace and track the spare parts ownership details from the original equipment manufacturer to the supplier and end-users. We exploit blockchain features to build a secure and trusted spare part inventory system that is tamper-proof, traceable, trackable, accessible immutable, resilient, and reliable. The proposed system integrates decentralized storage of interplanetary file systems (IPFS) to store and share spare parts data. We present algorithms along with their full implementation details. We perform testing and validation of the smart contract. Furthermore, we provide security and cost analysis, and show how the proposed system ensures reliable tracing and tracking of spare parts ownership. We make the smart contract source code publicly available on Github.
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