| Abstract: |
Modern supply networks have widened the gap between the traceability that regulators and consumers demand and the visibility that conventional enterprise systems provide. Centralised enterprise resource planning ledgers are fast and inexpensive but constitute a single point of compromise; first-generation public blockchains deliver immutability at the cost of throughput, latency, and energy. This paper presents the design and empirical evaluation of ChainSCM, a secure and scalable permissioned blockchain framework that integrates echelon-based dynamic sharding, a Proof-of-Traceable-Authority consensus that couples proof-of-authority leader election with Byzantine-fault-tolerant committee finality, content-addressed off-chain payload storage with on-chain hash anchoring, and attribute-based access control. Three empirical instruments were used: a thirty-day instrumented pilot on a three-echelon pharmaceutical and agri-food testbed that processed 88.1 million events across four deployment arms; a survey of 180 supply-chain professionals drawn from 62 organisations, a 72.0 percent response rate; and a security stress test of 1200 injected events per attack vector per arm. The proposed framework sustained 3456 transactions per second at sixty-four validator nodes, three times the rate of a Fabric-style permissioned baseline, while committing in 0.465 s and growing the ledger by only 2.11 GB per day. Tampering was detected at 99.6 percent, above the 98.5 percent of the permissioned baseline. Perceived traceability, security, scalability, and interoperability jointly explained 53.2 percent of the variance in adoption intention, with traceability strongest. Taken together, the results demonstrate that the classical security-scalability trade-off can be substantially relaxed, although interoperability with legacy systems, cited by 71.0 percent of organisations, remains the binding barrier. |
