Browsing by Author "Dietrich, Fabian Tobias"

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    Development of a blockchain-based traceability architecture for mapping object-related supply chain events
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2023-02) Dietrich, Fabian Tobias; Louw, Louis; Daniel, Palm; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Engineering. Dept. of Industrial Engineering.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Supply chains have evolved into dynamic, interconnected supply networks, which increases the complexity of achieving end-to-end traceability of object flows and their experienced events. With its capability to ensure a secure, transparent, and immutable environment without relying on a trusted third party, the emerging blockchain technology shows strong potential to enable end-to-end traceability in such complex multitiered supply networks. However, as the dissertation’s systematic literature review reveals, the currently available blockchain-based traceability solutions lack the ability to map object-related supply chain events holistically, which involves mapping objects’ creation and deletion, aggregation and disaggregation, transformation, and transaction. Therefore, this dissertation proposes a novel blockchain-based traceability architecture that integrates governance and token concepts to overcome the limitations of existing architectures. While the governance concept manages the supply chain structure on an application level, the token concept includes all functions to conduct object-related supply chain events. For this to be possible, this dissertation’s token concept introduces token ‘blueprints’, which allow clients to group tokens into different types, where tokens of the same type are non-fungible. Furthermore, blueprints can include minting conditions, which are, for example, necessary when mapping assembly or delivery processes. In addition, the token concept contains logic for reflecting all conducted object-related events in an integrated token history. This ultimately leads to end-to-end traceability of tokens and their physical or abstract representatives on the blockchain. For validation purposes, this dissertation implements the architecture’s components and their update and request relationships in code and proves its applicability based on the Ethereum blockchain. Finally, this dissertation provides a scenario-based evaluation based on two industrial case studies from a manufacturing and logistics perspective to validate the architecture’s capabilities when applied in real-world industrial settings. The proposed blockchain-based traceability architecture thus covers all object-related supply chain events derived from the two industrial case studies and therefore proves its general-purpose end-to-end traceability capabilities of object flows.
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    Development of a framework for tracking goods in manufacturing networks using a distributed ledger technology
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2020-03) Dietrich, Fabian Tobias; Louw, Louis; Palm, Daniel; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Industrial Engineering. Dept. of Industrial Engineering.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Globalisation, shorter product life cycles, and increasing product varieties have led to complex supply chains. At the same time, there is a growing interest by customers and governments in having a greater transparency of brands, manufacturers, and producers throughout the supply chain. Due to the complex structure of collaborative manufacturing networks, the increase in supply chain transparency is a challenge for manufacturing companies. Distributed ledger technologies offer an innovative solution to increase the transparency, security, authenticity, and auditability of products. However, there are still uncertainties when applying the distributed ledger technology to manufacturing scenarios and thus enable all stakeholders to trace the audit history of each component of an assembled product. This research work proposes a framework to increase the transparency and auditability of products in collaborative manufacturing networks by adopting the distributed ledger technology. The framework considers the challenges of manufacturing supply chains with the opportunities of distributed ledger technologies and combines them in a conceptual implementation process of supply chain management systems. In this context, each component of a product is represented by a unique virtual identity generated by distributed ledger-based smart contracts. These virtual identities can only be sent and merged if defined conditions specified in smart contracts are met. This enables all physical processes and their dependencies to be mapped in the distributed ledger. The results, based on a practical implementation of the framework, show that a transparent auditability of assembled products and all the components they consist of can be achieved. Applications based on the proposed framework can currently only enable real-time tracking reliably in permissioned networks. The implementation on a permissionless network provides full transparency for all stakeholders including the customer, while the implementation on a permissioned network only provides a restricted transparency for the customers.