The Perspectives of Supply Chain Management Using Natural Knowledge From 3D Blockchain Technologies and Avatar-Based and Geographic Information Systems (GIS)

Introduction

The Production supply chain consists of many participants like Producer, Consumer (people who buy the product and consume them), Wholesalers and Retailers. This system consists of many levels of mediator parties as well which have different policies of commission. Due to the difference in these policies, the Producers do not get their fair share of price. Due to the varying prices, consumers also suffer as they do not get the right quality of product for the right price (Tliche, Taghipour, & Canel, 2020). There are no central records maintained regarding the transactions between the participants which could lead to many serious problems. To tackle the above-mentioned issues, we need a holistic approach which can provide solutions to most of the above issues. Here, Blockchain based solution can be used to achieve: Traceability (we can trace the whereabouts of the product, origin of the product, etc.), Transparency (so that a sense of trust is achieved), Fairness (by removing the intermediaries), Assurance of products safety and pricing (so that nobody has to bear the loss). Digital Signature is a cryptographic approach to provide authenticity and integrity of the data. Here data can be anything software, images, videos, etc. (Radhoui, Taghipour, & Canel, 2018). With the above-mentioned services, it also provides one more important service, non-repudiation which was previously unknown to us. Non-repudiation in layman’s terms means that if I send a document to person X, then after some time I cannot deny sending the document.

The Digital Signature is divided into three main parts, Key Generation Algorithm, Signing Algorithm and Signature Verification Algorithm. The basic functionality of Digital Signature as mentioned above is providing authenticity, integrity, and non-repudiation. We will understand the process of Digital Signature through the following steps (Mahfod, Khoury, Depitre, & Taghipour, 2020):

• 1.

  Firstly, we compute the hash of the data to be signed. The used hash function is mentioned in the information of Digital Signature as it will be used by the receiver as well.

• 2.

  Then we encrypt this hash using our private key which is also called the Signature Key. The encrypted hash along with other information is the digital signature of that data. This is appended with the data and is sent.

• 3.

  The receiver receives the data along with its digital signature. The data itself is encrypted but let’s not get into that for now.

• 4.

  Receiver decrypts the received Digital Signature using the public key of the sender and gets the hash of the data.

• 5.

  Then using the algorithm mentioned in the information, the receiver computes the hash of the data sent. If this hash matches the one obtained from decryption, then we can guarantee that the data is not changed.

Background

As we saw all the background details required to understand the blockchain technology, we will now see the various types of blockchain that exist which have been classified according to their uses and their properties. Two main types of blockchain are Permissioned Blockchain and Permission-less Blockchain as a 3D Blockchain (Mkrttchian et al., 2019, 2020).