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Drug supply chains have been facing severe issues as counterfeit product cases are increasing exponentially. A supply chain management system that ensures transparency, reliability, and provenance of drugs would increase the trustworthiness of the whole industry. One solution to all three needs is utilizing blockchain-based distributed ledger technologies (DLTs). Even though DLTs are emerging as an ideal infrastructure for multi-stakeholder supply chain applications, they still need to be more mature to address the specific challenges specific to each use case. In this article, we propose a distributed blockchain-based framework, PHTrack, leveraging hyperledger sawtooth as a drug supply chain traceability system. Hyperledger sawtooth addresses scalability issues by offering a robust foundation to support large-scale drug supply chain operations in a modular way for it's each participating stakeholder. Furthermore, it simplifies the integration process with existing systems, even those employing different technologies, thereby facilitating a smoother transition to DLTs. The design of PHTrack is oriented towards minimizing resource consumption throughout the process, particularly within hyperledger sawtooth nodes. Additionally, it incorporates quantum secure off-chain communication for peer-to-peer (P2P) communication. A set of experiments was conducted to validate the proposed framework. Experiments have shown that PHTrack provides reliable and comprehensive drug provenance as well as real-time drug supply chain tracking.
Nawaz et al. (Tue,) studied this question.