A critical analysis of the integration of blockchain and artificial intelligence for supply chain

Annals of Operations Research https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-023-05169-w ORIGINAL RESEARCH A critical analysis of the integration of blockchain and artificial intelligence for supply chain Vincent Charles1,2 · Ali Emrouznejad3 · Tatiana Gherman4 Accepted: 4 January 2023 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2023 Abstract The integration between blockchain and artificial intelligence (AI) has gained a lot of attention in recent years, especially since such integration can improve security, efficiency, and productivity of applications in business environments characterised by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. In particular, supply chain is one of the areas that have been shown to benefit tremendously from blockchain and AI, by enhancing information and process resilience, enabling faster and more cost-efficient delivery of products, and augmenting products’ traceability, among others. This paper performs a state-of-the-art review of blockchain and AI in the field of supply chains. More specifically, we sought to answer the following three principal questions: Q1—What are the current studies on the integration of blockchain and AI in supply chain?, Q2—What are the current blockchain and AI use cases in supply chain?, and Q3—What are the potential research directions for future studies involving the integration of blockchain and AI? The analysis performed in this paper has identified relevant research studies that have contributed both conceptually and empirically to the expansion and accumulation of intellectual wealth in the supply chain discipline through the integration of blockchain and AI. Keywords Blockchain · Artificial intelligence · Supply chain · Systematic literature review · Bibliometric review · Thematic analysis B Vincent Charles Ali Emrouznejad Tatiana Gherman 1 CENTRUM Católica Graduate Business School, Lima, Peru 2 Pontifical Catholic University of Peru, Lima, Peru 3 Surrey Business School, University of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey, UK 4 Faculty of Business and Law, University of Northampton, Northampton, UK 123 Annals of Operations Research 1 Introduction Traditionally dispersed geographically, supply chains have always been difficult to manage. Supply chain complexity is caused by a variety of factors and its long-term viability necessitates effective maintenance, repair, and operations management, among others. In supply chain networks, everything from link maintenance and regulatory policies to cultural norms and human behaviour makes evaluating information and managing risk a difficult task (Ivanov et al., 2019). Trust can be easily undermined by inefficient transactions, fraud, theft, and weak supply chains, which highlights the need for better information sharing and verifiability (Saberi et al., 2019). In today’s business environment, traceability is becoming a necessity and a competitive advantage in many supply chain industries. Without transparency in the supply chain, stakeholders cannot properly assess and validate the true value of items. The cost of dealing with intermediaries, as well as their dependability and transparency, make managing supply chain traceability even more difficult, leading to strategic and reputational competitive issues (Saberi et al., 2019). There are a number of issues with today’s supply chains because they rely so heavily on central, sometimes disparate, and stand-alone systems of information management, such as enterprise resource planning systems (Saberi et al., 2019). The single point failure of centralised information systems is a drawback of such systems, which in turn makes the entire system vulnerable to error, hacking, corruption, or attack (Dong et al., 2017). Without doubt, there must be a high level of trust present for supply chain entities to entrust their sensitive and valuable data to a single organisation or broker (Abeyratne & Monfared, 2016). In addition, there are continuous pressures on supply chain practice to recognise and certify the sustainability of supply chains. Environmental, social, and business aspects must all be considered in order to achieve sustainability, as part of the triple-bottom-line concept (Seuring et al., 2008). As a strategic and competitive issue, supply chain sustainability requires confirming and verifying that supply chain processes, products, and activities meet certain sustainability criteria and certifications (Grimm et al., 2016). Existing supply chain information systems must be examined to determine if they can provide the secure, transparent, and reliable data needed to track the timely origin of goods and services. The key to resolving these difficult matters is to improve supply chain security, transparency, long-term viability, and process integrity. Blockchain technology could be the solution to this problem. New technological breakthroughs and applications based on the blockchain concept have made these objectives more attainable from an organisational, technological, and financial standpoint (Abeyratne & Monfared, 2016). With its decentralised ‘trustless’ database characteristics, blockchain technology can facilitate global-scale transaction and process disintermediation and decentralisation among a variety of different stakeholders (Crosby et al., 2016; Saberi et al., 2019). As Saberi et al. (2019) noted, although the number of blockchain use cases has grown over time, blockchain, like any potentially disruptive system or technology, faces a number of challenges and barriers in terms of adoption and implementation by supply chain networks. Blockchain is still in its early stages of development, posing a number of challenges in terms of behavioural, organisational, technological, and policy-related issues. Artificial intelligence (AI) promises to solve some of the above-mentioned problems. As a matter of fact, the integration of blockchain and AI is estimated to bring a number of significant various advantages, such as more robust deliverables (Odekanle et al., 2022). With such 123 Annals of Operations Research integration, parties can share massive amounts of data for the purposes of analysis, learning, and decision-making without the need for a central authority or third-party intermediaries. By automating the entire workflow, the use of AI technology in the blockchain system has the potential to redefine the supply chain. Using a combined AI and blockchain approach, useful information can be extracted from historical purchase data and other sources, allowing for the identification of data characteristics and the performance of predictive analysis tasks such as future demand and sales forecasting (Zhang et al., 2021a, b). In spite of its importance and relevance, to the best of our knowledge, there is, at the time of conducting this research, no systematic literature review of studies on the integration of blockchain and AI for supply chain. Our (...truncated)