Performance Evaluation of a Blockchain-based Traceability System : A Case Study at IKEA

Abstract: Establishing traceability in global supply chains is a complicated problem. Current solutions for achieving traceability are expensive or imperfect, and give rise to organizational and trust-related issues. Blockchain could present itself as a solution to many of these issues. This thesis aims to build a blockchain-based traceability system. Based on the event  characteristics in IKEA Supply Chain, our analysis show that, for timely processing, the capacity of a traceability system should be 10 593 events per second. Additionally, 14 requirements were identified and included in the system design. A system was designed that consists of six components, a client application, a controller, a smart contract pool, IPFS and Quorum. In order to reduce the potential load on the system, certain optimization measures were taken. The system design resulted in a load requirement of 14 975 transactions for a delay bound of one minute. The resulting performance of the developed system revealed itself to be a throughput of 159 transactions per second and a convergence time of 4.71 seconds, which is not enough to reach the requirement. However, a solution is proposed to divide the network into many smaller networks that together can produce the necessary throughput.