Blockchain-based solution for COVID-19 vaccine waste reduction

Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) vaccines have been produced on a large scale since 2020. However, large-scale vaccine production has led to two forms of waste; namely, overproduction and underutilization. Most of today’s systems and technologies used to manage waste data related to COVID-19 vaccines fall short of providing transparency, traceability, accountability, trust, and security features. In this paper, we address the problem of COVID-19 vaccines waste due to their overproduction and underutilization. We propose a blockchain-based solution that is composed of five phases: registration, commitment; production and delivery; consumption; and waste assessment. These phases make up the complete life cycle of a COVID-19 vaccine, and they are governed by several smart contracts to ensure accountability of all the actions taken by the involved entities and reduce any excessive waste caused by overproduction, overordering, or underconsumption. We ensure security, traceability, and data provenance by recording all actions through smart contracts in the form of events on an immutable ledger. We utilize decentralized storage such as the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) to reduce the costs posed by large-sized file storage when stored on-chain. We present algorithms that describe the logic behind our developed smart contracts. We test and validate the functionalities of our proposed solution. We conduct security, cost, and scalability analyses to show that our solution is affordable, scalable, and secure. We compare our solution with the existing blockchain-based solutions to show its novelty and superiority. The smart contract code is made publicly available on GitHub.