Resource-Based Blockchain Integration in Agri-food Supply Chains

In today’s agri-food 4.0 supply chains, food traceability is crucial for enhancing transparency, safeguarding consumer health, and fostering trust in the food ecosystem. Blockchain Technology (BCT) is proposed as a solution, offering immutable, transparent, and decentralized data persistence capabilities. The complexity increases in scenarios with intertwined supply chains, where actors engage with various BCTs, each having its own technological infrastructure, programming language for Smart Contracts, and strategies for handling large volumes of on-chain data storage, to save costs and ensure scalability. In this paper, we propose to treat traceability data exchanged among supply chain actors as resources, enabling standardized interactions with BCTs, rather than focusing on specific storage technologies. Our approach: (i) leverages a base model to create tailored views for modeling data resources in traceability for the agri-food supply chain, aligning data persistence with the Access Level requirements of the supply chain actors; (ii) defines a Resource-Oriented approach for integrating BCTs in intertwined supply chains, guided by these views, in order to develop BCT-based Web Applications. Experiments with a real case study demonstrate the benefits of our approach in addressing BCTs integration issues. In particular, in this paper we focus on how this approach supports enhancing agri-food 4.0 supply chains consumers trust and transparency.