Blockchain-Based Solution for Product Recall Management in the Automotive Supply Chain

Product recall management in the automotive industry is a challenging problem that affects human lives and the safe operation of automobiles. Product recalls can assist in removing potentially unsafe products from the marketplace and minimizing a company’s responsibility for corporate negligence. Today’s systems and technologies leveraged for product recall management in the automotive supply chain fall short in providing transparency, traceability, reliability, audit, security, and trust features. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based approach to overcome the aforementioned problems related to product recall management. We employ the public Ethereum blockchain and integrate it with the decentralized storage of the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to deal with the large-sized data problem. We present the system design and six algorithms explaining the working principles, information exchange flow, and stakeholders’ detail and their sequential interactions. We discuss the implementation details, generalization aspects, and cost and security analyses to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach. The proposed solution is cost-effective, secure, and enables automakers to have end-to-end visibility of information during product recalls. We make the smart contracts’ code publicly available on GitHub.