AQUACHAIN -Water Supply-Chain management using Distributed Ledger Technology

Abstract

Water shortage is fast becoming one of the biggest crises of this century. The recent, exponential rise in adoption of the most disparate Internet of Things (IoT) devices and technologies has reached also Water supply chains, drumming up substantial research and innovation interest towards developing reliable, auditable and transparent traceability systems. Current IoT-based traceability and provenance systems for water supply chains are built on top of centralized infrastructures and this leaves room for unsolved issues and major concerns, including data integrity, tampering and single points of failure. Blockchains, the distributed ledger technology underpinning cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, represent a new and innovative technological approach to realizing decentralized trustless systems. This will also eliminate corruption due to unmaintained record of sources. Indeed, the inherent properties of this digital technology provide fault-tolerance, immutability, transparency and full traceability of the stored transaction records, as well as coherent digital representations of physical assets and autonomous transaction executions. This paper presents Aqua-chain, a fully decentralized, blockchain-based traceability solution for Water supply chain management, able to seamless integrate IoT devices producing and consuming digital data along the chain. To effectively assess Aqua-chain, first, we defined a classical use-case within the given vertical domain, namely from-supplier-to-buyer. Then, we developed and deployed such use-case, achieving traceability using blockchain implementation, Ethereum. Finally, we evaluated and compared the performance deployments, in terms of latency, CPU, and network usage, also highlighting its main pros and cons.