Product certificates are sent throughout the supply chain of Swedish heavy industry in order to show provenance and physical characteristics of objects such as screws. The data management of the certificates has been, and still is, a very manual process. The process requires extensive work in order to maintain a correct record of the certificates. In particular, tracing causes of errors and establishing compliance's takes a long time and effort. The company Chaintraced is developing an application to automate the process by acting as a third party to digitalize and manage the certificates.
Introducing a third party in business to business processes requires trust in that data is not altered and that information reaches its destination. To cope with such scenarios there has in the recent five to ten years been extensive research in distributed ledger technologies. In particular, usage of blockchain technologies with its many sought after properties such as immutability and traceability of data. Blockchain technology reduces the trust needed between different parties through usage of cryptographic primitives and consensus mechanisms.
This thesis investigates possible usage of distributed ledger technology to further automate and improve the Swedish heavy industry supply chain. In particular, reduce the trust needed in a third party managing the certificates. Requirements for an industrial strengthen system is set up and several distributed ledger technology solutions are considered to fit the use case of Swedish heavy industry. A proof of concept based on the findings is implemented, tested and compared with a centralized database to explore its possible usage in the supply chain with regard to feasibility, immutability, traceability and security.
The research resulted in a prototype based on Hyperledger Fabric to store product certificates. The solution provides certain guarantees to immutability and security while developed with feasibility for deployment in mind. The performance results show that compared to a centralized solution the proposed solution is rather slow. The solution does however scale linearly with number of certificates and the performance is considered within bounds for the use case at hand. The results also show that the proposed solution is more trustworthy than a centralized solution, but adopting blockchain technology is an extensive task. In particular, trustworthiness and guarantees provided by the solution is highly dependent on the feasibility aspect and the research concludes that adoption of blockchain technology within the Swedish heavy industry must take this into consideration.