A Survey of Privacy-Aware Supply Chain Collaboration: From Theory to Applications

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the contemporary information era, the ubiquitous collection of data from different parties frequently accommodates significant mutual benefits to the involved participants. However, data is a double-bladed sword. Inappropriate access or use of data by the recipients may pose serious privacy issues that explicitly harm the data owners. In the past decade, swiftly increasing privacy concerns arise in many business processes such as supply chain management. How to protect the private information of different participants in the supply chain has become a key multidisciplinary research problem in information systems, production and operations management, computer science, and mathematics. Specifically, in the real world, manufacturers, distributors, and retailers commonly collaborate with each other to cater to the demands of supplying and marketing. In their traditional cooperation, all the parties completely share their proprietary information so as to jointly optimize their operations (e.g., maximize their profit or minimize their cost). Now, they realize that completely sharing such information would bring considerable negative impact to themselves. For overcoming this, some recent research results begin to make the following ideal occasion possible—all the participants collaboratively solve a realistic problem without revealing any private proprietary information to each other. In this paper, we primarily review the literature on the applications of privacy-preserving techniques to supply chain collaboration among multiple parties. We first identify various private proprietary information required in the supply chain collaboration, and discuss several potential privacy-preserving techniques. Then, we review the relevant research results from theory to applications. Since intensive collaboration in modern supply chains opens even more opportunities in both academia and industry, we finally outline the future research trend and the potential challenges in this promising area.