Automatic Generation of Ethereum-Based Smart Contracts for Agri-Food Traceability System

Abstract

There is a growing demand for transparency along the agri-food chain, both from customers and governments. The adoption of blockchain technology to enable secure traceability for the management of the agri-food chain, provide information such as the provenance of a food product and prevent food fraud, is emerging rapidly, due to the inherent trust and inalterability provided by this technology. However, developing the right smart contracts for these use cases is even more of a challenge than it is for those used in other fields. Several management systems for the agri-food chain based on blockchain technology and smart contract have been proposed, all however ad-hoc for a specific product or production process and difficult to generalize. In this paper, we propose a new approach to easily customize and compose general Ethereum-based smart contracts designed for the agri-food industrial domain, to be able to reuse the code and modules and automate the process to shorten development times, while keeping it safe and reliable. Starting from the definition of the real production process, we aim to automatically generate both the smart contracts to manage the system and the user interfaces to interact with them, thus producing a system that works semi-automatically. Additionally, we describe a honey production case study to show how our approach works. Future work will first extend the scope of the approach to other supply chains, furthermore, while the current platform used is Ethereum, in the future our approach will be easily extended to other blockchain platforms.

Keywords

• Agri-food product traceability
• blockchain
• smart contract
• supply chain