The Unknown Potential of Blockchain for Sustainable Supply Chains

Abstract

The growing attention to emerging technologies has raised several doubts regarding the sustainability aspects. Among the new technologies, blockchain has laid the foundations for a revolution in the financial field but also in the energy, tourism, medical, industrial and supply chains sectors. Through a systematic literature review, 37 documents were analyzed to describe the sustainable aspects generated using blockchain in supply chains. Therefore, the results achieved provide two levels of analysis. The former highlights the impact of the adoption of blockchain in supply chains based on the three dimensions of sustainability: environmental, economic and social. The latter shows the positive and negative impacts of each form of sustainability. The purpose of the work is to summarize the current state of the art in order to propose a future development agenda based on the need to simulate and define a measurability for each dimension of sustainability. Finally, the study provides a broad overview of practical and managerial implications for entrepreneurs and researchers. On the one hand, the work shows how the use of blockchain improves the profits and reputation of companies. On the other hand, it highlights several research gaps to be investigated and considered by researchers.

Technical Sustainability of Cloud-Based Blockchain Integrated with Machine Learning for Supply Chain Management

“…Then, less stringent conditions were used in the literature search by taking out the specific search terms 'machine learning', 'data analytics' and 'data analysis' from the search. After that, some previous studies and literature review papers (e.g., [16,20,57,58]) on adoption of blockchain for sustainable supply chain (instead of sustainable blockchain) were found. The reference lists from these found papers provided sources for recursive literature search that could identify more previous studies missed by the previous internet search.…”

“…. quantitative metrics reflecting blockchain in the business world are needed" [20]. In these regards, more quantitative empirical studies on sustainable supply chain performance model are needed.…”

“…As highlighted by Varriale, Cammarano, Michelino and Caputo [20], the previous studies about the sustainable aspects related to impact of blockchain in supply chains explored three forms of sustainability: environmental, economic, and social. Environmental sustainability is concerned with protecting and maintaining environmental resources for the betterment of the living environment.…”

“…The significance of the research presented in this paper is twofold. First, as shown in the reported studies about the sustainability issues of adopting blockchains for supply chains reviewed in this paper and by other researchers (e.g., [16,20]), many previous studies (e.g., [21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30]) focused on how blockchain technology can be applied to improve environmental, economic, and social sustainability for supply chain sustainability, but little research explored technical sustainability. Technical sustainability refers to the longterm technical administration, maintenance, development, and support of an innovative technology in order for its continuation, advancement (e.g., increased efficiency [31]) and resilience (e.g., resilient supply chains [32]).…”

“…Regardless that the applications of blockchain technology to supply chain field are still in their infancy stage, as blockchains grow and more rapidly expanding blockchains emerge in the blockchain P2P network, the supply chain parties have to face the problem of the blockchain sustainability in terms of its key performance issues such as availability, scalability, latency, throughput, and big data storage capacity [33,34]. This technical problem also hinders the supply chain users' adoption of blockchain technology [20]. The proposed study in this paper attempted to design a blockchain architecture based on cloud infrastructure (or simply, blockchain on cloud) in order to ensure the technical sustainability for supply chain management.…”