Abstract:
In the pharmaceutical industry, problems like counterfeit drugs including vaccines, and their supply chain management problems like transparency, immutability, and traceability exists. Around 30% of the total medicine sold in Latin America, Africa, and Asia are counterfeit according to WHO. In Pakistan, around 40-50% of drugs are fake. Now in case of vaccines, it becomes more difficult to standardize and detect fake vaccines because the public has less awareness and knowledge about vaccines. The rise of internet pharmacies gives more opportunities for counterfeits vaccines to enter the authentic supply chain management system. We present TISVSchain, a framework based on blockchain to handle the issues of counterfeits vaccine, and vaccine supply chain problems like transparency, immutability, and traceability. Our proposed framework can run, both on private and public blockchain. We have implemented the framework on public blockchain by using remix ide and the smart contracts designed by solidity language run on very low gas cost. An offline unique account address is assigned to the vaccine manufacturer if it meets the quality standards and only through that account it can access the network. We have also tested the framework on a private blockchain it shows us promising results. We also carried out the number of experiments by changing the number of nodes and their block-time to evaluate the performance of our framework in terms of transaction per second, gas cost, and propagation delay. Our proposed framework improves the security by using offline unique account address in blockchain based framework and improved the overall efficiency of framework by keeping the gas cost low, finding a way to decrease the number of lost blocks to keep low propagation delay, and by keeping high TPS value. TISVSchain shows us promising results to improve the overall performance, security, and efficiency of vaccine supply chain management
