Global (and national) supply chains are a network of stakeholders, each involved in producing, handling, or monitoring a product. These organizations have implemented various types of internal software systems fit for their specific needs. This results in fragmentation or creation of data silos. As items are transferred between multiple actors, critical information about these items needs to be shared with business partners as well as government authorities, certification agencies, and potentially the end consumer. While most of the actors in the supply chain store a wealth of data in their legacy systems, this silo approach hinders the transfer of information leading to inefficiencies, manual overhead, traceability issues, recalls, food fraud, etc. Especially in critical situations (e.g., in case of food safety issues), an infrastructure is needed that offers all relevant actors trusted data for decision support (e.g., a swift and efficient product recall). Unova proposes a novel approach for supply chain data distribution, coordination, and innovation. The approach is based on Web3: a trustless infrastructure that takes advantage of smart contracts and blockchain technology. This allows for cutting-edge applications to be built on decentralized web software protocols. The Unova privacy-enabled data distribution protocol is specifically designed as the backbone of applications that will in turn leverage the distributed data and enable solutions to most of the currently faced supply chain problems. It leverages smart contracts, a combination of on-chain and off-chain data flows, and the L1-L2 architecture.
Privacy-enabled data distribution protocol
The main aspects of the distribution protocol are:
Bundle configuration
The configuration parameters to be set for a bundle creation are the minimum bundle size and the checking period.
Data request
Once the transaction is executed, the blocks are distributed to the other nodes in the network.
Data validation
Once the bundleData has been received a final validation happens to confirm that the data has not changed.
Bundle creation
The Type-2 nodes are responsible for creating, distributing and sheltering the supply chain assets and events data which is done by distributing bundles.
Partner confirmation
When a Type-2 node requests the data from the creator Type2 node, the creator will validate whether it should be sending the data to this node by confirming with the partner list and the initial transaction.
Distribution smart contract
The distribution smart contract is executed to put the bundleId (Hash) inside a block as part of a transaction.
Data distribution
If the requester node is a partner and the public key is part of the transaction, only then the bundleData will be distributed to the requesting Type-2 node.