Blockchain in the Electronics Industry for Supply Chain Management: A Survey

Supply chain as an industry has gone through four-fold changes in the last century. Born as a bare-bones structure in 1.0 it grew to incorporate some form of record preservation in 2.0 and then integrated communication between two entities in 3.0. Supply chain 4.0, the current one, has total global integration of multiple entities with the records digitised. But increasing entities and pipelines, means increasing complexities, overhead and soft spots. In this paper, a systematic literature review is done with the objective of analysing existing Supply Chain 4.0. The focus of the paper is the usage of blockchain technology in the electronic industry to provide a decentralised architecture. Several papers were compared on the basis of different schemas like the type of blockchain network used, platform deployed on, security of frameworks, representation of unique identity, testing authenticity, working implementation, cost of implementation, etc. The pros and cons of various privacy and security methodologies are also explored and discussed. The paper also discusses the open issues and challenges in the same area of interest. Finally, the paper outlines the future scope to be delved into as a part of the future research.