Blockchain-based pharmaceutical supply chain: a scalable and transparent model for drug traceability
TL;DR
Experimental results indicate that the proposed BBPSC scheme outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in terms of throughput, communication cost, deployment cost, latency, and scalability.
Abstract
An efficient Supply Chain Management (SCM) system is crucial for ensuring product quality, safety, and reliability. The pharmaceutical supply chain includes all processes from the collection of raw materials to the secure delivery of drugs to end consumers. However, traditional pharmaceutical SCM systems often suffer from limited transparency, traceability, scalability, and security, which increase drug counterfeiting and trust issues among stakeholders. To overcome these challenges, this paper proposes a novel Blockchain-Based Pharmaceutical Supply Chain (BBPSC) management system. The proposed scheme records, monitors, and verifies every stage of the pharmaceutical supply chain while ensuring data security. It integrates Filecoin for decentralized off-chain data storage, the Edwards-curve Digital Signature Algorithm (EdDSA) for cryptographic authentication, and Ethereum-based smart contracts to enable secure, immutable, and automated supply chain operations. In the proposed system, the Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism is used to validate transactions before they are included in the blockchain, thereby enhancing efficiency and reducing computational overhead. Informal and formal security analyses presented in this paper demonstrate the resilience of the proposed scheme against major security attacks. Experimental results indicate that the proposed BBPSC scheme outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in terms of throughput, communication cost, deployment cost, latency, and scalability.