Arabian Journal for Science and Engineering

https://doi.org/10.1007/s13369-018-3537-z

RESEARCH ARTICLE - COMPUTER ENGINEERING AND COMPUTER SCIENCE

Novel Automatic Food Trading System Using Consortium Blockchain

Dianhui Mao1 · Zhihao Hao1 · Fan Wang1 · Haisheng Li1

Received: 13 July 2018 / Accepted: 29 August 2018

© King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals 2018

Abstract
Conventional food trading platforms face several issues, such as quickly to find trading objects and protect the reliability of
transaction information. With e-commerce developing rapidly, food trading has also recently shifted to the online domain.
Blockchain has changed many industries owing to its robustness, decentralization and end-to-end credibility. This paper
proposes a novel Food Trading System with COnsortium blockchaiN (FTSCON) to improve trust and security issues in trans-
actions. It uses consortium blockchain technology to set permission and authentication for different roles in food transaction,
which meet the challenge of the privacy protection of multi-stakeholders. The algorithm of optimized transaction combination
is designed for the purpose of helping users find suitable transaction objects. It can choose the optimized trading portfolio
for buyers. The online double auction mechanism is used to eliminate competition. And the improved PBFT (iPBFT) is
used to enhance efficiency of system. Moreover, a smart-contract life- cycle management method is introduced, and security
analysis shows that FTSCON improves transaction security and privacy protection. Experiment results based on a series of
data indicate that the proposed algorithm can achieve profit improvement of merchants.

Keywords Secure food transaction · Consortium blockchain · Consensus process · Smart contracts · Online double auction ·
Combination strategy

1 Introduction late payments for perishable food products, last-minute

The food supply chain is an important part of food trad-
ing. There are many multi-stakeholders in food trading:
farmers, processors, traders, wholesalers, retailers and con-
sumers. Many organizations and nations have made provi-
sions to create a fairness trade environment. For instance,
the European Commission was proposed in April 12, 2018,
to ban the more damaging unfair trading practices in the
food supply chain to ensure fair treatment for small- and
medium- sized food and farming businesses. These include
B Zhihao Hao
hao_zhihao@126.com
Dianhui Mao
maodh@th.btbu.edu.cn
Fan Wang
wfan0601@163.com
Haisheng Li
lihsh@th.btbu.edu.cn
1
Beijing Key Laboratory of Big Data Technology for Food
Safety, School of Computer and Information Engineering,
Beijing Technology and Business University, Beijing 100048,
China
order cancellations, and unilateral or retroactive changes
to contracts [1]. These problems will not only harm the
stability of the food market, but will also lower the effi-
ciency of the transaction. In addition, due to the complexity
of the transaction process, high transaction costs and long
transaction times can lead to inefficient transactions either.
Therefore, it is necessary to find solutions that can pro-
tect fairness of transaction and improve efficiency in food
transaction.
Academic research which looks at the rise of automated
trading has considered its effects on market liquidity, effi-
ciency, volatility and the costs or benefits to retail and
institutional investors, with varied results. The automatic
trading thought is to make the computer automatically trade
for users according to the conditions set by users in advance.
It originated from the automatic trading mechanism of
a˛śstock portfolio transfer and tradinga˛ś that appeared in the
USA in 1975. However, it subjects to the rules of the financial
market [2] and the principle of ensuring the stability of the
financial market, and the portfolio needs to be set by investors
themselves. Thus, the outcome depends on the quality of the
investment plan.

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Table 1 Comparison among blockchains

Public blockchain Consortium blockchain Private blockchain

Access permission mechanism Permissionless Permissioned Completely isolated

Consensus mechanisms
Transaction approval freq.
Advantages
Disadvantages
(Anonymous, Could be malicious)
Proof of Work (POW), Proof of
Stake (POS), etc.
(Large energy consumption, No
finality, 51% attack)
Long
Bitcoin: 10 min or more
1. Low access threshold, 2. Full
disclosure
1. Low throughput, 2. Slow pace of
trading
(Identified, Trusted)
Voting or multi-party consensus
algorithm
(Lighter, Faster, Low energy
consumption, Enable finality)
Short
100 × msec
1. Fast transaction, 2. Wide range
of application, 3. High security
High node performance
requirements
(Identified, Trusted)
Voting or multi-party consensus
algorithm
(Lighter, Faster, Low energy
consumption, Enable finality)
Short
100 × msec
Low transaction cost
1. Concentration of power, 2. Easy
to be manipulated

Unlike financial markets, this provision is unreasonable
for small- and medium-sized food and farming enterprises
in the food market because the perishable nature of the food
causes the value of the food to change with the quality of the
food. In addition, due to the centralized storage of informa-
tion in the traditional transaction process, the risk of leakage
is high. For example, the largest information leakage acci-
dent in Korean history occurred in 2013 and shocked society
when it was reported that personal information of around
104 million individuals was leaked [3]. Besides, the trust cri-
sis caused by information asymmetry will also damage the
enthusiasm of the business, and it is not conducive to market
stability and economic development.
Blockchain technology could be put to use safeguarding
automated trading mechanism. It has attracted the interest of
stakeholders across a wide span of industries: from finance
[4] and health care [5,6], to utilities [7], real estate [8] and the
government sector [9]. Recently, it has been introduced for
food trading [10]. The reason for this explosion of interest:
with a blockchain in place, applications that could previously
run only through a trusted intermediary, can now operate
in a decentralized fashion, without the need for a central
authority, and achieve the same functionality with the same
amount of certainty. This was simply not possible before.
The blockchain is a P2P distributed ledger technology, which
enables food trading to be executed in decentralized, trans-
parent and secure market environments.
Blockchains are typically deployed in one of three com-
monly known environments depending on their access
permissions: public, consortium, and private environments.
Public blockchains are the most permissive among all three.
It is the blockchain that anyone in the world can read, send
transactions to and anyone and participate in the consensus
process—the process for determining what blocks get added
to the chain and what the current state is. These blockchains
are generally considered to be “totally decentralized.” Dif-
ferent from the public blockchains, fully private blockchains
are the most restrictive. It is the blockchain where write
permissions are kept centralized to one organization. Read
permissions may be public or restricted to an arbitrary extent.
This type of blockchains could be deployed in the private net-
work of a single company; thus, it is mainly used for database
management, auditing and so on within a single company.
Consortium blockchains are often described as more inter-
esting than the two other types of blockchains. It is the
blockchain where the consensus process is controlled by a
preselected set of nodes. The right to read the blockchain
may be public, or restricted to the participants, and there
are also hybrid routes such as the root hashes of the blocks
being public together with an API that allows members of
the public to make a limited number of queries and get
back cryptographic proofs of some parts of the blockchain
state. A good example for this kind of blockchain would
be a consortium of financial institutions, who may com-
pete with one another. To serve such purpose, consortium
blockchains are usually deployed in environments that con-
sist of multiple organization networks often interconnected
by the Internet. These blockchains may be considered “par-
tially decentralized.” The detailed comparison of the three
blockchains is shown in Table 1. According to Table 1, the
authors find that the consortium blockchain is better than
the public blockchain and private blockchain in terms of
transaction speed and security and so on. In addition, the
consortium blockchain has infinite possibility and a bright
future in the business field. There are many famous organi-
zations used consortium blockchains to grow their business,
for instance R3CEV LLC (R3), the largest consortium of
global financial institutions working on developing commer-
cial applications for the distributed ledger technology. They
have built their own consortium blockchain, called Corda.
Since those days, R3 has rapidly grown from the original nine
banks to now over 200 banks, financial institutions, regula-

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tions and trade associations. The goal of R3 is to cut across
asset classes, geographies and market participants. It also
presents an opportunity to work together in a collaborative
way in order to build new financial technology platforms
based on cryptocurrencies and distributed ledger techniques.
It may to shape the new rails upon which many industries
will operate in the future.
Motivated by these developments, in this paper, we exploit
the consortium blockchain technology to develop a secure
automatic food trading system. The consortium blockchain
is a specific blockchain with multiple authorized nodes to
establish the distributed shared ledger with moderate cost. A
consortium blockchain is established on authorized nodes to
publicly audit and share transaction records without relying
on a trusted third party. Food transaction records among user
nodes are uploaded to the authorized nodes after encryption.
The authorized nodes will audit the transactions and record
them into the shared ledger. This ledger is publicly accessed
by nodes connected to the consortium blockchain. Moreover,
since the trading portfolios of merchants need to be opti-
mized, an iterative optimization of the transaction matches
algorithm which is designed to maximize demand of buyers
in the system. The contribution of this paper is summarized
as follows.
– For the purpose of helping users find suitable transac-
tions. We have designed an algorithm that can choose the
optimized transaction combination for buyers, and we
have used online double auction mechanism to eliminate
competition.
– A smart-contract life-cycle management method is intro-
duced in the system to reduce the risk of system attack
possibility and improve the security of the system.
– The authors have improved PBFT (iPbFT) and made
i- PBFT to be more efficient than traditional consensus
algorithm.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2
details related work. Core system components are illustrated
in Sect. 3. Implementation details are discussed in Sect. 4.
Section 5 presents experiment platform, security analysis and
numerical results, and the paper is concluded in Sect. 6.
2 Related Work
Reductions in transport and transaction costs are expected to
have a major effect on the functioning of food transaction. For
many developing countries, this is a relevant issue as it may
have important consequences for the food markets in urban
and rural deficit areas [11]. At present, most of the solutions
to food trade problems are from the perspective of the food
supply chain such as electron spin resonance (ESR) [12]. It
helps regulators gather and manage information to a certain
extent, but they mostly target at food traceability, food stan-
dard, risk assessment and the food inspection. There is also
a existing gap. To remedy this issue, a concept using radio
frequency identification (RFID) has been proposed [13,14].
This solution uses RFID tags to track products along the dis-
tribution chain. This extends the traceability of the product
to the entire supply chain instead of being confined to the
production stage. It also digitizes the recording of data and
changes the method of identification to individual products
instead of batches. IoT has a promising future in improving
existing systems and tools [15]. Li et al. [16] formulated a
tracking method for prepackaged food based on the internet
of things (IoT), and it tracks prepackaged food products to
monitor the entire supply chain. Besides, Pang et al. [17]
used the internet of things designing the solution for food
supply. These technologies suffer from some obvious draw-
backs: centralization of data storage increases susceptibility
to leaks and tampering, and the opaqueness of the transaction
introduces doubt. However, blockchain technology not only
can be a key enabler to solve many IoT security problems
[18], but also perfectly overcome these defects.
Blockchain technology has proven to be a highly rev-
olutionary technology with applications in many fields. It
has seen wide use in financial applications since the begin-
ning. Omran et al. [19] devised a supply chain finance
framework based on blockchain technology, and Benos et
al. [20] researched securities settlement using distributed
ledger technology. The conclusion was that blockchain tech-
nology can lower cost and enhance efficiency. Blockchain
is used not only in financial fields but also in other fields
as well, like the multimedia blockchain use for media trans-
action [21], and Sikorski et al. made an implementation of
blockchain technology facilitating a M2M electricity market
[22]. Hasan et al. presented a blockchain-based proof-of-
delivery (POD) solution which facilitates the trading and
tracking of sold items between two parties in a decentralized
way [23]. Using blockchain technology in the food indus-
try is a new area of research. For instance, a system based on
hazard analysis and critical control points (HACCP) for food
supply chain traceability uses blockchain and the IoT [24].
Smart contracts are supposed to herald the era of
blockchain 2.0. Karajovic et al. [25] applied smart contracts
to automate taxation and optimize accounting processes .
Smart contracts can also be used as automatic custodians of
digital assets or executing contractual obligations in a safe,
verifiable, and deterministic manner [26]. An effective mech-
anism of using smart contracts to automate transactions does
not exist yet and is the subject of this paper. This research
topic has in fact gained a lot of attention recently.
Several existing applications combine blockchain and
food technology. The primary idea is to solve food safety
issues using blockchain. Major corporations have supported
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this issue. Wal-Mart, Nestlé and IBM have formed a global
food safety blockchain alliance. The main responsibilities
are monitoring the supply chain, which involves storing sup-
ply chain data in the blockchain [27] and leveraging RFID
technology to manage the supply chain using blockchain
[28]. The technologies will authenticate, verify, record and
provide an open report on the transfer of ownership and pro-
vision of products and goods. For food producers, the use
of blockchain could assist in stopping the use of fake ingre-
dients by detecting it much faster. The platform is based on
the consortium blockchain. Extensively tested and piloted, it
addresses a wide range of business pain points, including both
business and technical requirements around privacy, collab-
oration, performance and security that no other blockchain
platform delivers today. The integrated platform allows mul-
tiple parties to jointly govern, develop, secure and operate
blockchain networks to help companies accelerate consor-
tium blockchain adoption.
Preparatory research and analysis make it clear that it is
necessary and feasible to incorporate blockchain technology
to automated food trading systems. The initial approach of
this study was introducing a public blockchain since it is
readable by any party: Any user can initiate a transaction
and it can be verified, and any user can participate in this
consensus process. Such an automated trading system takes
advantage of all the benefits provided by public blockchains.
Further research, however, shows that for an excessive num-
ber of nodes, the processing speed of the background system
will diminish when all nodes are required to run a consensus
algorithm, possibly causing harm to the underlying system.
Furthermore, for transactions with a high volume of data,
efficiency is reduced since each node stores the same data.
From a thorough analysis of the benefits and drawbacks
of several blockchain mechanisms, the authors decided to
utilize consortium blockchain technology for the study’s
automatic trading system.
3 The Core Components of the Food Trading
System
3.1 Consortium Blockchain for FTSCON
Blockchain technology is a modern P2P technology with
applications in distributed computing and decentralized data
sharing and storage. Prior to recording a transaction in a
blockchain, a process called consensus processing is applied
to verify the data. This process is traditionally carried out
by all nodes of the system, and traditional transaction pro-
cess contains multi-stakeholders. This essentially means that,
in order to prove that a node has permission to write to
the blockchain, complicated algorithms must be run, which
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Arabian Journal for Science and Engineering
in turn require large amounts of computing power. Fur-
thermore, the restriction on the number of transactions the
network could process was small; thus, they were piling up
which created congestion and prompted users who were in
a hurry to pay hefty charges so that nodes pick up their
transactions and include them in a block. In addition, the
problems like scalability, security flaws, governance, legal-
ity, human error, transaction costs, imperfect competition
between blockchains seem to be piling up. All of these prob-
lems increasing cost and ruining efficiency. The system is
designed and can solve these problems. The architectures for
FTSCON includes the following entities as shown in Fig. 1.
(1) User Node User nodes can play two roles in the system:
buyer node or seller node. The role is chosen according
its current state and planning. In this paper, the buying
node is denoted by u 1 and the selling node is u 2 ,
(2) Scheduling Node The scheduling node has the authority
to verify transaction data and calculate optimal trading
objects for the users of the system, and the scheduling
nodes are represented as si (i = 1, 2, …, n).
The consortium blockchain is made up of three parts:
(1) Block containing the transaction data The scheduling
nodes contain the bulk of the raw data. Computational
and storage limits make it necessary for the user nodes to
store an index of the metadata containing the metadata
location to bring down system cost. The scheduling node
manages local transaction records, which are encrypted
and assembled after the scheduling nodes have reached a
consensus. A cryptographic hash in each block points to
the previous block, enabling validation and traceability.
Blocks are added to the chain chronologically. Because
of this, both scheduling and user nodes can access the
data freely.
(2) Consensus mechanism This is a mechanism that enables
consensus to be achieved among blockchain nodes
across the entire network, based on block information.
It can be used to ensure that the newest block has been
added to the chain properly, and the chain data stored in
the nodes have not been maliciously forked or altered.
(3) Smart contract Within the blockchain context, smart
contracts are scripts stored on the blockchain. (They can
be thought of as roughly analogous to stored procedures
in relational database management systems.) Since they
reside on the chain, they have a unique address. We trig-
ger a smart contract by addressing a transaction to it. It
then executes independently and automatically in a pre-
scribed manner on every node in the network, according
to the data that were included in the triggering transac-
tion.
Arabian Journal for Science and Engineering
Fig. 1 The automatic food trading system
The portion of Fig. 1 containing set s denotes a group of
scheduling nodes, while the portion containing u 1 , u 2 and
si is a schematic of the transaction process. The bottom left
contains the block with transaction information, while on the
right is the transaction data module.
3.2 Operation Details of FTSCON
In essence, the consortium blockchain is a P2P model. The
rights and obligations of all peers in the P2P network are the
same. In this paper, the authors consider that each buyer and
seller as a node of a P2P network, and their trading rights are
equal.
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To ensure the integrity and consistency of the supply and
demand data across all nodes, a specific area in the system
is separated and designated as the trading pit. Before the
transaction data are uploaded to the trading pit, it is grouped
by scheduling node after taking into account demand, supply
and food type.
Demand or supply data are send directly by u 1 and u 2 to the
nearest scheduling node si , which records this information
in the cache table. The transaction data are then uploaded to
the transaction pit. The scheduling nodes will mutually agree
upon a time t, at which they will download all information
in transaction pit and run an algorithm to analyze the data
to select the optimal trading portfolio for u 1 . The algorithm
will be detailed in Sect. 4. The uniformity of the supply and
demand data across all nodes means that the result of the
algorithm will be identical for time t. The algorithm com-
putes, in this case, that the most optimal transaction object
for u 1 is u 2 , which is relayed to u 1 by si . u 1 then finds u 2 with
its public address, and a smart contract is automatically gen-
erated by the system. Both parties sign the contract and agree
to the automatic execution of the transaction. If u 1 is unsat-
isfied the transaction objects calculated by si , it can send the
demand information to si again, and the calculation process
is repeated until u 1 is satisfied.
4 Details of the Food Trading System
4.1 The Method of Optimal Transaction Combination
The section explains a scheduling node how to reach a
consensus; it needs to find the usera˛ŕs optimal transaction
combination, automatically conducts the transaction through
the FTSCON and verifies the transaction information.
i) Transaction Objects Selection
To ensure market fairness and stability, we prescribe that
the right and obligation both of buyers and sellers are the
same. Let v be a measure of buyer’s loss in transit; multiple
factors can change this value in the real world, but there are
two factors having a higher bearing on the final v value. Under
the premise that freight and other expenses are born by the
buyer, the value loss of buyer will be calculated according to
the formula shown below (Eq. (1)). The algorithm is based
on the formula.
⎛ ⎞
 m  n
ν = −⎝ ci j xi j + λ ∗ ω⎠ (1)
i=1 j=1
The two terms of the formula are the transport cost and the
loss value of the food caused by the transport time, where ci j
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Arabian Journal for Science and Engineering
is the unit freight shipped to each place, xi j is the quantity
of food transported to various places and i, j represent the
origin label and the place of sale label, respectively. Here,λ is
the loss value of the unit shipping volume, and ω represents
the total shipping volume [29].
The proposed algorithm is derived from dynamic pro-
gramming. Dynamic programming (DP) is a very useful
tool in solving optimal control problems. It is an algorithm
attributed largely to Bellman, which is developed for opti-
mizing a multistage (the term stage represents time step
throughout the paper) decision process. If the return or cost at
each stage is independent and satisfies the monotonicity and
separability conditions, the original multistage problem can
be decomposed into stages with decisions required at each
stage. The decomposed problem then can be solved recur-
sively, two stages at a time, using the recursive equation of
DP. DP is particularly suited for optimizing reservoir man-
agement and operation as the structure of the optimization
problem conforms to a multistage decision process. Over the
past half decade, DP had been used extensively in the opti-
mization of reservoir management [30] and operation [31].
For some buyers’ part, the general understanding is that a
single supplier cannot meet the entire demand. To calculate
the correct number of suppliers to meet the demand, core
issues need to be addressed. That is, the transaction combi-
nation with the smallest loss of food value is selected under
the condition that the demand of the buyer is greatly satisfied.
In the course of the research, the author found that the idea
of solving the 0–1 knapsack problem can solve this problem
perfectly. Here, the value loss of each buyer is v and supply
volume of each seller is n, and under the condition of the total
demand of the buyer is N , the equation is defined as follows:
⎧
⎪
⎨0
f [i][n] = f [i − 1, n]
⎪
⎩
max{ f [i − 1][n], f [i − 1][n − n[i]] + v[i]}
(2)
The 2D array f [i][n] represents the minimal value loss
of food i to the buyer. The current demand of buyer is n.,
which is the addition of these batches of food supplies and
can greatly satisfy current buyer demand. It is assumed that
the previous i − 1 pieces of food have all been selected, and
the current value loss is f [i − 1, n].
The previous formula makes it clear that the selection
results in the user being matched with the best possible
merchant. To arrive at this formula, Algorithm 1 has been
designed.
ii) Bargaining Process
After the scheduling nodes selects the transaction combina-
tion for the buyer, the buyer and the seller objects need to
Arabian Journal for Science and Engineering
Algorithm 1 The Algorithm For Choose Optimal Objects
Input: The array of values loss v[m], the demand array n[m];
Output: The minimal value loss of the buyer receives and the corre-
sponding merchant number i;
1: for n ← 1 to N do
2: if n i  n then
3: if vi + f [i − 1, n − n i ] > f [i − 1, n] then
4: f [i, n] ← vi + f [i − 1, n − n i ];
5: return i;
6: else
7: f [i, n] ← f [i − 1, n];
8: end if
9: else
10: f [i, n] ← f [i − 1, n];
11: end if
12: end for
13: return f [m, N ];
negotiated price. The sellers quotation directly affects their
own profits and whether it can be accepted by the buyer. Sell-
ers must weigh the bidding strategy to maximize its profit.
The seller only knows exactly its own cost function, pay-
ment function, the buyers decision-making type space, etc.,
and vice versa. Obviously, the game between the seller and
the buyer is a dynamic game process. In the actual price
negotiation, the bid price of the negotiating parties is not
simultaneous, usually one party gives a price, and the other
party chooses to accept or reject. If it is refused, he can give
his own price, and they continue to negotiate this price until
the conclusion of the negotiations. For the bargaining game
between the seller and the buyer, it is clear that the seller first
quotes, and the buyer starts from his own profit maximiza-
tion goal based on this price to decide whether to accept the
quotation. If the buyer accepts the price, they will use the
smart contract to execute the transaction, otherwise it enters
the next round of bargaining game, so this is a dynamic pro-
cess of rotating bidding. The profit function of buyers and
sellers is as follows:
Assuming that the number of bargaining round is N , in the
N round, the buyer’s bid price is Wn/2 b , and seller’s accept
price is Wn/2 s . We use Ws and Wb to indicate the seller’s and
buyer’s expectations for the price of the food. The transaction
may executed when Ws  Wb . Here, when N is odd:
r1 = δ n−1 (W(n+1)/2 s − Ws )
r2 = δ n−1 (Wb − W(n+1)/2 s ) (3)
and when N is an even number:
r1 = δ n−1 (Wn/2 b − Ws )
r2 = δ n−1 (Wb − Wn/2 b ) (4)
r1 and r2 are profit of seller and buyer, respectively, and δ n−1
is a coefficient of convergence, that is, the coefficient of return
after refusal. Otherwise, both parties will be bargaining for
countless times to obtain the lowest price.
iii) Online Double Auction Mechanism
In the actual transaction process, there are transaction
objects combination results that may satisfy the requirements
of multiple buyers. There will be competition among differ-
ent buyers. At this time, the online double auction mechanism
is used. The double auction mechanism can solve problems
like how to effectively use network resources and lighten the
network load. Different from unilateral auction, double auc-
tion is a˛śmany-to-manya˛ś market structure. That means, there
is more than one buyer and seller. It is an inter-networking
information exchange model where auctioneers and bidders
are equal.
The process is as follows: The scheduling node opens the
market, buyer nodes and proxies (here, proxy is chosen by
seller nodes in transaction combination) will have the highest
willing price in each round of auction according to their own
conditions, and the scheduling node collects quoted price
and picks the current highest price of buyer and lowest of
proxy. As soon as the highest quoted price of buyer is higher
than or equal to the lowest proxy quote, the trade executes
immediately and proceeds in sequence until all transactions
were completed and the market was closed. In this paper, we
found that loopholes such as serious asymmetry in informa-
tion between buyers and sellers in the auction process [32]
are perfectly fixed. And based on the work of Fu [33], the
formula for the maximum auction efficiency is as follows:
2 1 1
ai = vi + Vmin + Vmax ,
3 4 12
2 1 1
bi = m j + Vmin + Vmax . (5)
3 12 4
The ai denotes the quotation of the i buyer, vi denotes
the estimate price of the i buyer, Vmin denotes the lowest bid
announced by the market, Vmax denotes the highest quotation,
b j denotes the quotation of the j seller, and m j denotes the
j seller cost.
After the auction is finished, the transaction price is deter-
mined and smart contracts are generate by system.
4.2 Smart Contract
Smart contracts can be considered as a set of digital promises.
For a user, a smart contract is effectively an automatic guar-
antee by which, for instance, information is shared when
specific conditions are satisfied. It is a programmable con-
tract between two parties that is stored in the blockchain
and tagged with a bespoke blockchain address. The contract
is executed when its conditions are met. This mechanism
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improves trust between users due to the credibility of the to carry on attacks. Therefore, in order to improve the secu-
blockchain. rity of the system, we adopted life-cycle management for
Using the above information, a smart contract will be smart contract [35].
defined to satisfy the aforementioned process. The contract Figure 2 shows a smart-contract life cycle of agri-
shows u 1 and u 2 engaging in a trade, with both parties food transaction. It requires cross-organizational information
depositing the same amount of money initially. The parties logistics automation. FTSCON can act as a collaboration
are meant to execute the contract before the deadline, failing hub that serves as a preparation platform for the inception
which the respective funds are returned. We assume that the of smart contracts, and a designer creates a template for
price is Wn/2 . Additionally, the contract defines functions a FTSCON into which service types are inserted together
that calculate the outcome and which either party can call with roles. Since the transaction process involves other roles
upon. These functions are detailed in Algorithm 2. besides buyer and seller, these service roles are called service
roles here. These roles are considered to be potential part-
ners which match the service offer into the service type roles
Algorithm 2 Smart Contracts. are affiliated with organizations that cooperate in the smart
1: address public u 1 , u 2 ;
2: State public state ;
contract. Users as service consumers can decide whether
3: data deadline, threshold a service offer is acceptable. As all nodes are in position
4: // extract the public key and status information of u 1 , u 2 , and define and service types match with acceptable service offers, the
deadline and conditions of the swap contract smart-contract negotiation starts. The process of negotia-
5: def determine.outcome();
6: if state != .state then
tion is essentially the process of bargaining for agri-food.
7: if block.timestamp < deadline then The general consultation in this process has two results:
8: price = Wn/2 ; agreement or disagreement. If the negotiation results in dis-
9: if price > =threshold then agreement, then the transaction is terminated. The bargain
10: send(u 2 , self.balance);
11: purchaseConfirmed();
is accepted by all nodes and the consensus occurs, which
12: else is the prerequisite for a contract establishment. Smart con-
13: send(u 1 , self.balance); tracts enable distributed management. Therefore, each nodes
14: purchaseConfirmed(); of the running case receive a local contract copy from which
15: end if
16: else
a set of respective obligations are deduced. Next, all col-
17: The transaction failed and the funds return to both sides. laborating nodes could do their own job, and this process
18: end if is called the private processes. For enabling information
19: else exchanges among nodes, the communication endpoints must
20: Both sides are offline, the transaction cannot be carried out for
now.
be established. That way, the management of transaction is
21: end if automated. If there is a quality change caused by violation,
an assigned agent will escalate the event and the buyer will
check the breach severity. Assuming the agri-food is seri-
The research shows that the smart contract has many ous deterioration and can not be sold, the buyer triggers
security problems [34]. Smart contracts present a new tar- a disruptive rollback that collapses the transaction. How-
get to attackers beyond the sophisticated attacks required ever, if the agricultural product is only of reduced quality,
to attack blockchain. The security problems surrounding it can still be successfully sold at a lower price that the
smart contracts have challenged its development, destroy- buyer tolerates. At this point, the goods are reassigned for
ing many promising projects and lowering the public trust transportation.
in smart contracts. Unlike Web applications, smart contracts The life-cycle management is important for vetting col-
are directly linked with money and exploit typically result- laborating parties to reduce security breaches such as those
ing in immediate financial loss. In reality, there are many Ethereum recently experienced. But there are many prob-
instances of attackers exploiting the logic of smart contracts lems with system efficiency. Therefore, we propose a new
to perform attacks with effects such as draining of funds, consensus process based on FTSCON to improve efficiency.
gaining an advantage over other users of the smart contract,
and rendering the smart contract unusable. These attacks
are often truculency because of the huge amounts of value 4.3 Consensus Process
placed in these smart contracts by their users. In this sec-
tion, the security vulnerabilities of Ethereum smart contracts It is well known that a challenge for blockchain as the
were systematized. The vulnerabilities were grouped in three blockchain network is distributed. In blockchain, there is no
classes, according to the level where they are introduced (as central node that ensures ledgers on distributed nodes are all
shown in Table 2). All these vulnerabilities can be exploited the same. Some protocols needed to ensure ledgers in dif-

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Table 2 The security

Number Level Vulnerability Cause
vulnerabilities of smart contracts
1 Contract source code Call to the unknown The called function does not exist
(Solidity)
2 Gasless send Fallback of the callee is executed
3 Exception disorders Irregularity in exception handling
4 Type casts Type-check error in contract
execution
5 Reentrancy vulnerability Function is reentered before
termination
6 Keeping secrets Private value is published by the
miner
7 EVM bytecode Immutable bug Alter a contract after deployment
8 Ether lost Send Ether to an orphan address
9 Stack overflow Because of stack size limit, the
number of values in stack
exceeds 1024
10 Blockchain Unpredictable state State of the contract is changed
before invoking
11 Generating randomness Seed is biased by malicious miner
12 Timestamp dependence Timestamp of block is changed by
malicious miner

Fig. 2 Life-cycle management

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Table 3 Typical consensus

Property POW POS PBFT
algorithms comparison
Node identity management Open Open Permissioned
Energy saving No Partial Yes
Tolerated power of adversary < 25% computing power < 52% stake < 33.3% faulty replicas

ferent nodes are consistent. We next present three common Algorithm 3 iPBFT
approaches to reach a consensus in blockchain. Input: Both parties’ transaction information. It contains the identity
Proof of work (POW) is a consensus strategy used in the information of the two parties are key1 , key2 , the type of transaction
commodity denote c, the number of signed nodes is n, the number
Bitcoin network. In PoW, each node of the network is cal- of transactions abbreviated as num, and the transaction time is t;
culating a hash value of the block header. The block header Output: Approval of transaction information or not;
containing a nonce and miners would change the nonce fre- 1: n ← 0
quently to get different hash values. The consensus requires 2: if key1 =key1bu f f er then
3: if key2 =key2bu f f er then
that the calculated value must be equal to or smaller than a 4: if c = cbu f f er && num = num bu f f er && t = tbu f f er then
certain given value. When one node reaches the target value, 5: The transaction information is signed and time stamped by
it would broadcast the block to other nodes and all other the scheduling node.
nodes must mutually confirm the correctness of the hash 6: n ←n+1
7: else
value. If the block is validated, other nodes would append 8: The trading information is not approved and send the trans-
this new block to their own blockchains. This process needs action information and n to the next scheduling nodes.
all nodes involved in; therefore, these works waste too much 9: end if
resources. Proof of stake (POS) is an energy-saving alterna- 10: else
11: The trading information is not approved and send the trans-
tive to PoW. Nodes in PoS have to prove the ownership of action information and n to the next scheduling nodes.
the amount of currency. PoS saves more energy and is more 12: end if
effective compared to PoW. Unfortunately, as the mining cost 13: else
is nearly zero, attacks might come as a consequence. Practical 14: The trading information is not approved either and send the trans-
action information and n to the next scheduling nodes.
byzantine fault tolerance (PBFT) is a replication algorithm 15: end if
to tolerate byzantine faults. A new block is determined in a 16: if n is bigger than or equal to fifty-one percent of the total number
round. In each round, a primary would be selected according of scheduled nodes. then
to some rules. And it is responsible for ordering the transac- 17: The transaction information is recorded into the block and put
the block into blockchain.
tion. The whole process could be divided into three phase: 18: else
pre-prepared, prepared and commit. In each phase, a node 19: The transaction information is considered false.
would enter next phase if it has received votes from over 2/3 20: end if
of all nodes. So PBFT requires that every node is known to
the network. Influenced by the work of Zheng et al. [36], the
comparison of the three consensus algorithms is shown in total nodes (such as 51%), consensus is said to be reached,
Table 3. after which the transaction is recorded in the block and the
It is clear that PBFT is better than POW and POS on block is appended to the blockchain. iPBFT is detailed in
resource-saved and security. However, the number of blocks Algorithm 3, which starts with the submission of the trans-
generated by running the current consensus algorithm cannot action data to scheduling node si .
meet the transaction volume in reality. Therefore, we choose
PBFT for improvement to enhance efficiency.
This paper proposes an improved PBFT (iPBFT) algo- 5 Experiment Platform, Security Analysis
rithm whose underlying principle is using the automatic and Numerical Results
transaction mechanism of the system to verify transaction
information. It can be seen from Fig. 1 that the transaction 5.1 Experiment Platform
is verified by u 1 and u 2 after completion, after which both
of them encrypt and upload the transaction data to the near- The FTSCON, including consortium blockchain, Web server
est scheduling node si , which verifies the information based and client browser, is built by Ethereum architecture. The
on its cache table, signs and timestamps it if the verification Web server is developed by PHP; the client browser page is
is successful, and then sends these data to other scheduling written using HTML/CSS/JavaScript. Consortium blockchain
nodes. If the number of signed nodes is more than half of the is designed to record transaction information, nodes data,
transportation process and time. The optimization of trans-

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Fig. 3 Screenshots of FTSCON interface. a Transaction objects. b Block information. c Market page. d Post information

action combinations is made in the consortium blockchain. A Table 4 Experiment environment

Web server is responsible for collecting supply/demand data, Language Solidity and Javascript
block data, real-time in-auction data and nodes feedback data.
The client browser is responsible for friendly display, inter- Sandbox EVM
acting with nodes and collecting nodes transaction intentions Containerization Docker 17.10.0
(see Fig. 3). Hash function SHA-256
Ethereum is a blockchain with built-in Turing-complete
programming language, giving users power to write smart
contracts, decentralized applications where users define their
delays to emulate high latency in mobile networks and con-
own arbitrary rules for ownership, transaction formats and
figure the Linux kernel firewall with Iptables 9 to emulate
state transition functions. Ethereum also has provided tools
churns. We have used Geth v1.6.4 10 for all of our empiri-
for building consortium blockchains [37]. Thus, we have
cal evaluations. Before the actual experimentation, we let the
deployed a Ethereum consortium blockchain residing on
system stabilize for a few hours to obtain appropriate param-
multiple virtual machines running Ubuntu Linux v14.04 in
eters in later runs. To form a fully connected P2P blockchain
an Openstack environment. Each virtual machine is given 1
network, we disabled the auto-discovery feature supported
virtual CPU core, 2 GB of memory and 10 GB of persis-
by Geth and configured the overlay network manually. Other
tent storage to meet the minimum hardware requirement for
implementation environment and cryptographic algorithms
running Ethereum. Elastic search was used to store block-
are shown in Table 4.
related information. The network behavior was monitored
using the Python Web3 Library. All virtual machines are
linked together in a low-latency local network that can be 5.2 Security Analysis of Blockchain
customized on demand. Our setup peers every node using a
single Gigabit Ethernet switch. With this setup, a communi- In order to analyze the security of the system after obtaining
cation round-trip time between every two nodes is less than 1 the consent of the merchant, we collected the transaction data
ms on average. We employ Linux traffic control to introduce of this merchant for the whole month of August 2017. SQL

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Fig. 4 Transaction information in blockchain

Sever 2017 was used to combine transaction data in and do

further analysis (Fig. 4).
As shown in the figure, FTSCON can meet the follow-
ing security requirements: 1) Privacy Protection: The use of
scheduling nodes to run the optimal user transaction algo-
rithm requires the user to insert only their public address
when it is broadcast (like f r om and to columns). Private
information is never released, enhancing security. 2) No
reliance on a single external party: The system uses a P2P
system without a central third party to provide a robust and
scalable system. 3) Transaction authentication: With the
iPBFT, transaction data are publicly verified by scheduling
nodes. This eliminates the need for high-powered hardware.
4) Data integrity After the transaction information is put
into the block, it will correspond to a specific block num-
ber (block − N umber ), and the block will be encrypted by a
hash function to generate a unique hash value (blockhash).
The consortium blockchain is decentralized and digitally
Fig. 5 Parameters in smart contract
signed, so malicious nodes cannot corrupt networks using
forged digital signatures or by hijacking system resources.
5) Transaction security and no duplicate transaction: Dig- on the blockchain, which is a distributed digital ledger. The
ital currencies use digital signatures to certify ownership, sequence of transaction information on the blockchain deter-
and transaction information encrypted using a hash function mines the state of each contract and the balance of each
(as transaction H ash column) by scheduling nodes. More- user. Because contracts have an economic value, it is vital
over, the public history prevents duplicate transactions. This to guarantee that their execution is performed correctly. It
secures transactions to a certain extent. also features exceptions, but with a peculiar behavior. When
an exception is thrown, it cannot be caught like the execution
5.3 Security Analysis of Smart Contract stops, the cost is lost, and all the side effects including trans-
fers of ether are reverted. Contracts are made up by fields and
Ethereum is a decentralized virtual machine, which runs functions. A user can invoke a function by sending a suitable
programs (contracts) according to request of users. The transaction to the Ethereum nodes.
Turing-complete bytecode language can write contracts, Contracts can be illustrated through a few examples (see
called EVM bytecode. Roughly, a contract can be seen as Figs. 5, 6 and 7), which implements an open auction. Here, a
a set of functions, each one defined by a sequence of byte- programming language like Javascript called Solidity can be
code instructions. One significant feature of contracts is that used rather than programming it directly as EVM bytecode.
they can transfer ether (a kind of cryptocurrency) from (or Generally, the idea of the auction contract is that everyone
to) users and to other contracts. Users send transaction infor- in bidding process can send their bids during the bidding
mation to the Ethereum network for create new contracts, stage. The bids already include sending money (or ether) for
invoke functions of a contract and transfer ether to contracts binding the bidders to their bid. If the highest bid is raised,
or to other users. All the transaction information is recorded the previously highest bidder gets her money back. After the

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Fig. 6 The bidding function
Fig. 7 The withdraw function and the end function
end of the stage, the contract has to be called manually for the
beneficiary to receive his (or her) money because contracts
cannot activate themselves.
Figure 5 represents a series of parameters used in this
contract. The constr uctor creates a simple auction with
_bid − dingT ime seconds bidding time on behalf of the
beneficiary address _bene f iciar y. The bid() in Fig. 6
is an example which bids on the auction with the value
sent together with this transaction. The value will only be
refunded if the auction is not won. No arguments are nec-
essary, and all information is already part of the transaction.
The keyword payable is required for the function to be able
to receive Ether. Revert the call if the bidding stage is over.
The first parameter require represent revert the call if the bid-
ding stage is over, and the second parameter means if the bid
is not higher then send the money back, simply calling the
highest Bidder. Sending (highest Bid) function directly to
sending back the money is a security risk because it is possi-
ble to execute an untrusted contract. It is always safer to let
the recipients to withdraw their money themselves. In Fig. 7,
withdraw() means withdrawing a bid that was overbid. It is
important to set pending Retur ns[ms − g.sender ] to zero
because the recipient can call this function again as part of
the receiving call before send returns. The auction End() on
behalf of end of the auction and send the highest bid to the
beneficiary. It is a good guideline to structure functions that
interact with other contracts (i.e., they call functions or send
Ether) into three phases as checking conditions, perform-
ing actions (potentially changing conditions) and interacting
with other contracts. If these phases are mixed up, the other
contract could call back into the current contract and mod-
ify the state or cause effects (ether payout) to be performed
multiple times. If functions called internally including inter-
action with external contracts, they also have to be considered
interaction with external contracts.
Since FTSCON introduced the life-cycle management
of smart contracts, it is considered to have significantly
improved in defending against attacks. In order to quan-
tify the risk of being attacked after using the system, the
authors deployed a testnet of 7 VMs: one malicious node
and two groups of victims with similar power of 3 VMs
each. All VMs run go-Ethereum or geth version 1.8.13 and
are connected through a network similar to the above exper-
iment configured with different message latencies to mimic
multiple realistic geographical scales: from almost no delay
(< 1ms) to 250 ms delay. Ethereum was setted overlay so
that each node is connected to one another through a fully
mesh logical topology by manually configured. Each router
employs a daemon that advertises reachability to the adja-
cent networks to its neighbors. By repeating this process,
each router is eventually informed about the location of any
destination network of some nodes. To start the attack, the
malicious node first configures a router under its control to
maliciously advertise, to the neighbor routers, nonexisting
direct routes to those two nodes. In this way, the adversary
can launch an attack to blockchain network to steal money
or make double payments. Here, the authors compared the
probability of successful Ethereum attack with the probabil-
ity of successful attack after using FTSCON, as shown in
Fig. 8.
As mentioned in Fig. 8, the two pictures represent the
situation of network delay of less than 1 ms and 250 ms,
respectively, and present the average probability from 70
trials for each attack duration, respectively. In Fig. 8a, the
probability of success in attacking Ethereum was slightly
higher than that of success in attacking FTSCON, with a
average percentage of 2.3%. In Fig. 8b, the probability of
success of attacking FTSCON is still higher than that of suc-
cess of attacking Ethereum, with an average percentage of
2.1%. As a result, FTSCON has significantly improved in
safety.
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Fig. 8 Attack success rate with hijacking in two different systems

5.4 Experiment Results and Discussion

1) Efficiency of Algorithm

To validate our model, we emulated a transaction process-

ing scenario by issuing transactions at 1 tps (overall rate)
from multiple clients to randomly selected addresses. We
sort information timestamps in ascending order. To obtain
optimizing time of transaction objects, we record the times-
tamp upon initiation of a algorithm and extract the inclusion
timestamp from the transaction receipt. Here, four algorithms
were used for the comparison of execution time: the proposed
algorithm and the backtracking algorithm, branch-and-bound
algorithm and genetic algorithm, the last of which is the most
commonly used. Large-scale real information of transaction
is not readily available, and small-scale data cannot provide Fig. 9 Time analysis of algorithms with increasing datasets
satisfactory results. Here, we also used dataset that derived
from user-shared data [38,39] (about 10,000 test cases) and
that used by Kulkarni et al. in their study [40] (twenty distinct
test cases). These experimental datasets include the volume times. The average value will be finally calculated (Fig. 10a).
of each item and its corresponding value, and the capacity of The results of the proposed algorithm are processed as piece-
the backpack also can be used for experiment. wise functions for better analysis. Other results are processed
The running time of the algorithm can reflect the effi- as points of different shapes (Fig. 10b).
ciency of the algorithm. Here, each algorithm was ran in 50, Figure 9 makes it clear that the proposed algorithm is
100, 150 , 250 and 500 groups of data, respectively, and each faster than the branch-and-bound algorithm and backtrack-
algorithm ran 1000 times using every set of data. Due to the ing algorithm. However, the genetic algorithm is still faster
large amount of data, the difference between the results of than the proposed one. From Fig. 10a, b, it is clear that the
the algorithms is too large to better analyze. Therefore, we backtracking algorithm performs similarly to the proposed
have reduced the amount of data to 10 numbers based on the algorithm, only slightly lower (0.137%), and the branch-
original image (Fig. 9). Comparing the value after the algo- and-bound algorithm has results identical to the proposed
rithms, run is another criterion for efficiency measurement. algorithm. When it comes to the genetic algorithm, the dif-
And here, we run each algorithm using the same dataset as ference is small for a small dataset like 50, 100, 150 (1.358%,
the experiment of running time and run the same number of still significant), but for large datasets as 250, 500, the per-

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Fig. 10 Value results from running algorithms

formance is significantly lower (up to 4.764% compared to

the proposed algorithm).
After the comprehensive analysis of the above results,
although the first experiment shows that the time of the
genetic algorithm is faster than the proposed algorithm, but
in the second experiment, the difference between the genetic
algorithm and the proposed algorithm in the selection of value
become larger and larger with the increase in the dataset. In
the actual situation, the criteria for measuring system are not
limited to time, and the most important factor is the value.
Therefore, it is more reasonable to use the proposed algo-
rithm.

2) Efficiency of the System

After the development of the system, a small case study was
performed on data that were obtained from one of the partners
that collaborated within the project FTSCON. Our case study
was performed on profits data, collected by Web servers.
FTSCON functionalities illustrate the systems use and pro-
vide examples of the obtained results, thus, to serve as a
proof of concept. The data include profits on 300 enterprises
in Shandong province between January 2014 and Decem-
ber 2017. Each data include a description of the location
(region, spatial coordinates and location type), a description
of the device (model and device id), the timestamp of the
transaction, the count of transaction products and the type of
transaction products species. Additionally, the project ana-
lysts also calculated the profit outcomes due to the use of
FTSCON functionalities. Within the analyses, the data from
the first years of the FTSCON use (2017) were compared
to the average data of 3 years with preceding the integration
FTSCON (2014–2016). Figure 11 displays the comparison
Fig. 11 Quarter-wise profits with and without FTSCON
results that were able to provide reliable data from the Web
server.
It can be seen that January losses were higher using the
existing trading model, and the February profit was lower
as well. March onwards, the profit curve using the proposed
system rose, with a higher monthly profit than the traditional
system. Even in months with a declining trend, such as July,
September, October and December, the proposed method
provided better profits than the existing one. Thus, we draw
a conclusion that site selection is one of the most impor-
tant decisions for the establishment of a enterprise operation.
The production location influences the competitiveness of
the farm and enterprise by conditioning environmental and
economic factors. The influence of environmental factors on
crop growth has implications for the time required to reach

123

the desired commercial size and therefore for the costs asso-
ciated with the cultivation process. The most investigated
factor is transaction strategies, which is the characteristics
that have the greatest influence on food trade rate. In addition
to these factors, food transactions are also affected by sea-
sonal factors. Moreover, FTSCON can also help merchants
to destock and eliminate deficits.
Based on these experiments, FTSCON outperforms tradi-
tional ones in terms of runtime, value selection and merchant
profits.
6 Conclusion
This paper proposed an automatic merchant transaction
mechanism. The consortium blockchain model was lever-
aged to design an automated transaction system, where food
can be traded independent of a trusted third party. FTSCON
maximizes merchant profits. A security analysis revealed that
the proposed method improves the security and privacy of
the transaction. A numerical analysis confirmed the efficacy
of the system in maximizing merchant profit quickly and at
low computational cost. Of note is that the underlying con-
cept of blockchain technology still presents problems with
respect to computational resources, transaction cost, block
speed and scalability. Furthermore, different merchants with
the same type of supply may be in competition, and we use
the online double auction mechanism to eliminate it. The
technological evaluation of the blockchain still needs to be
conducted in terms of computational resources, transaction
costs, block speeds and scalability. This will be the next
step of our work. Additionally, as computational costs of
the on-chain matching algorithm depend on the number of
supply and demand information and cannot be determined
in advance, a fair mechanism for the allocation of these cost
has to be determined.
Acknowledgements We warmly thank for the support and funding by
the research projects of The Social Science and Humanity on Young
Fund of the ministry of Education (17YJCZH127) and the Fund of the
social science and Nature Science of Beijing Technology and Business
University (LKJJ2017-13).
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