Design and implementation of distributed traceability system for smart factories based on blockchain technology

Abstract

Manufacturing enterprises are facing the challenges of productivity improvement, product and process quality management due to the lack of data interaction and manufacturing process traceability. In modern factory, number of machineries are pipelined into assembly/production lines which may merge and branch to meet the procedure requirements. Each machine on the assembly line generates huge amount of sensing data and manufacturing data. However, many manufacturing system are not ready to manage big data. This paper aims on developing the distributed traceability system with Blockchain technology on IoT devices in order to improve the stability of the factory production line, to reduce defect rate and to bring the operational performance to a new level. Without depending on centralized storage, it is a robust, truly distributed peer-to-peer system and capable of node failure tolerance. With better scalability and data interaction, this distributed ledger network enables the use of data collection with security and potential of public traceability system protocol which allows multiple factories to participate, build an ecosystem of traceability together.