Abstract

As counterfeit drugs continue to become more prevalent in the pharmaceutical supply chain, it poses significant threats to patient safety, public health, and economic stability. The traditional pharmaceutical supply chain systems are primarily based on centralised databases and manual checks, which limits transparency, traceability and data integrity. According to various global health organizations, counterfeit drugs make up more than 10% of the pharmaceutical products in developing nations, and great need of a secure and transparent monitoring system. The goal of this study is to create a framework for a blockchain and Internet of Things (IoT) enabled pharmaceutical supply chain that can enhance the tracing and security of pharmaceuticals. It combines the technology of distributed ledger with IoT sensing devices to create a secure transaction validation, real-time monitoring and tamper-resistant tracking system in the supply chain. A mathematical model that is based on this probabilistic aspect of the sensing reliability and verification frequency is developed for the evaluation of the probability of detecting a counterfeit drug. Moreover, an adversarial behavior and economic incentives analysis using a game-theoretic security model is provided to help understand the CTD problem. The real-time logistics monitoring and secure cloud verification are implemented using edge devices based on AM62x. Experimental results indicate that the proposed framework can achieve a higher probability of counterfeit detection (up to 0.89-0.98) compared with the conventional systems (0.48), and can reduce the transaction confirmation latency from 250 ms to 80 ms. The results indicate that there is greater transparency, trust and resiliency in the pharmaceutical supply chains.