Blockchain-based traceability in Agri-Food supply chain management: A practical implementation
Open accessAbstract
The recent, exponential rise in adoption of the most disparate Internet of Things (IoT) devices and technologies has reached also Agriculture and Food (Agri-Food) supply chains, drumming up substantial research and innovation interest towards developing reliable, auditable and transparent traceability systems. Current IoT-based traceability and provenance systems for Agri-Food supply chains are built on top of centralized infrastructures and this leaves room for unsolved issues and major concerns, including data integrity, tampering and single points of failure. Blockchains, the distributed ledger technology underpinning cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, represent a new and innovative technological approach to realizing decentralized trustless systems. Indeed, the inherent properties of this digital technology provide fault-tolerance, immutability, transparency and full traceability of the stored transaction records, as well as coherent digital representations of physical assets and autonomous transaction executions. This paper presents AgriBlockIoT, a fully decentralized, blockchain-based traceability solution for Agri-Food supply chain management, able to seamless integrate IoT devices producing and consuming digital data along the chain. To effectively assess AgriBlockIoT, first, we defined a classical use-case within the given vertical domain, namely from-farm-to-fork. Then, we developed and deployed such use-case, achieving traceability using two different blockchain implementations, namely Ethereum and Hyperledger Sawtooth. Finally, we evaluated and compared the performance of both the deployments, in terms of latency, CPU, and network usage, also highlighting their main pros and cons.
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Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Four out of 10 articles in the first cluster are strongly focused on using blockchain for product traceability in food chains.
“some of the articles of the first cluster (i.e., four out of 10) are strongly focused on the use of blockchain technology, with the aim of ensuring product traceability in food chains [45,75,77,82].”
From A Review of Blockchain-Based Systems in Transportation (2019) · cites this paper as [82]
Papers [78,82] propose real implementations based on existing blockchains: Ethereum [78] and Ethereum and Hyperledger [82].
“Papers [78,82] also propose real implementations, but based on existing blockchains: Ethereum [78] and Ethereum and Hyperledger [82].”
From A Review of Blockchain-Based Systems in Transportation (2019) · cites this paper as [82]
Only three documents in macro-clusters C1 and C2 present a real implementation based on real blockchains.
“Some of them propose new platforms just at a concept level [45,51,52,75,77,83,84,88,89,91], some of them present proofs of their concepts [76,79,81], and only three of them present a real implementation based on real blockchains: [78,80,82].”
From A Review of Blockchain-Based Systems in Transportation (2019) · cites this paper as [82]
AgriBlockIoT can ensure IoT devices integration.
“It can ensure IoT devices integration”
From A Review of Blockchain-Based Systems in Transportation (2019) · cites this paper as [82]
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- Authors
- Caro, M. P., Ali, M. S., Vecchio, M., & Giaffreda, R.
- Affiliations
- FBK CREATE-NET Research Center (IT)
- Venue
- 2018 IoT Vertical and Topical Summit on Agriculture - Tuscany (IOT Tuscany)
- Publisher
- IEEE
- Published
- 2018-05
- Pages
- 1-4
- OpenAlex
- W2805552798
- Cited by
- 861
- References
- 10
- Citations by year
- 2026: 41 · 2025: 89 · 2024: 105 · 2023: 144 · 2022: 160 · 2021: 156 · 2020: 113 · 2019: 48 · 2018: 5
- FWCI
- 63.18
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- ieeexplore.ieee.org
- Licence
- other-oa
- Locations
- Archivio istituzionale della ricerca (Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- IRIS eCampus Telematic University (Università degli Studi eCampus) (submittedVersion)
- Institutional Research Information System (Università degli Studi di Trento) (submittedVersion)
- Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Funders
- European Commission (688088, HORIZON2020)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
- Life Sciences › Agricultural and Biological Sciences › Food Science › Food Supply Chain Traceability
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Blockchain Technology in Education and Learning
- Keywords
- blockchain, supply chain traceability, agri-food supply chains, Internet of Things, decentralized systems, provenance, Ethereum, Hyperledger Sawtooth, performance evaluation, data integrity
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