Simulation-based Blockchain Design to Secure Biopharmaceutical Supply Chain

Abstract

Bio-drugs grow rapidly and become one of the key drivers of personalized medicine and advancement of life sciences. Driven by the unique challenges in biopharmaceutical supply chain management and also built on two-layer QuarkChain, we introduce a blockchain enabled interoperability framework and it has the reputation based Proof-of-Authority (PoA) smart contract. Given the real-time monitoring data streams of distributed systems, blockchain can improve the transparency and integrity of delivery processes. We introduce stochastic simulation to guide the blockchain design so that we can protect drug products from theft, temperature diversion, and counterfeiting, while improving the supply chain reliability, efficiency, and responsiveness. The preliminary empirical study demonstrates that our approach has promising performance.