A Process Adaptation Framework for Blockchain-Based Supply Chain Management

Blockchain technology has been applied to supply chains in many industries, such as manufacturing, retail, agriculture, and pharmaceutics. Blockchains can improve supply chain integrity by providing a level playing field for resource-constrained small-to-medium size businesses to participate in a supply chain process and demonstrate trustworthiness. As with many complex and highly connected processes, significant uncertainties could arise in supply chains at the physical level of goods and transports, and the digital level of data and blockchain transactions. Supply chain uncertainties include upstream supply uncertainty, internal process uncertainty and downstream demand uncertainty, which require flexible mechanisms for run-time process adaptation that existing blockchain technologies do not adequately support. In this paper, we propose a framework that enables process adaptation through attaching and detaching process fragments defined in smart contracts to a process instance dynamically at run-time. The proposed framework is compared with an existing static process method and another existing blockchain-based solution supporting process adaptation.