Increasing convergence of virtual space and physical space driven by society 5.0 has propelled research in distributed ledgers to identify how trust in autonomous systems and robotics can be enabled through decentralised frameworks for decision making and consensus building. Industrial, multi-robot systems, embedded systems, and more have seen growth in applications using distributed ledgers. Although progressing, implementations are currently ad-hoc with middleware systems, such as ROS, not yet adopting a standard to permit easy integration of these technologies. Nor is the technology readiness level of distributed ledgers easily identifiable. This creates challenges for adoption and system integration.
The Food Supply Chain (FSC) can be made more efficient, resilient, and transparent by implementing industry 4.0 technologies. In this context, blockchain and the Internet of Things (IoT) become a panacea for several FSC problems. As a result of FSC complexity and their specific needs, the adoption of Blockchain integrated IoT (B-IoT) in FSC is challenging, and further investigation is required. Therefore, this study aims to explore the Critical Success Factors (CSFs) for the adoption B-IoT in FSC. To achieve this objective, a literature review is conducted to identify the CSFs of B-IoT adoption and then a grey Delphi is conducted on finalised CSFs. Ten CSFs finalised that faceplate for the adoption of B-IoT in FSC. Further, these CSFs were analysed through a grey Decision-Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) to determine the importance and causal relationships among them. A grey DEMATEL analysis also categorised these factors into influencing and influenced groups. The findings showed that “top management support”, “knowledge management”, “technology hardware readiness”, “skilled personnel”, and “high investment” were the influencing factors that needed to be addressed for the effective adoption of B-IoT. The FSC partners could benefit from the findings of this study by focusing on high-priority CSFs. The causal relationship among CSFs also helps the managers achieve optimal utilisation of resources. Further, this study encourages the FSC stakeholders to adopt the B-IoT in their supply chain to improve their performance.
Sergio A. Salinas Monroy, Pan Li, Yuguang Fang, Kenneth A. Loparo
Additive Manufacturing (AM) is transforming the way that we fabricate, deliver, and consume a wide range of products and components, including those for consumers, medical devices, automobiles, and aircraft. In AM, 3D-printers are used to fabricate products by depositing material in a layer-by-layer fashion, leading to extremely low marginal production costs and significantly simplifying the manufacturing supply chain by providing the opportunity for production that is much closer to consumers. With extremely low marginal costs, AM facilities can quickly scale their production up and down, or redirect their resources to produce entirely different types of goods to meet dynamic market demands. However, most AM companies that employ 3D-printers have not yet upgraded their operations in a way that improves their supply chain. In this paper, we first offer an overview on the state-of-the-art of AM supply chains and then present a novel blockchain-empowered system architecture, namely, Additive Manufacturing-as-a Service (AMaaS), that can facilitate the speedy adoption of AM in manufacturing industries. Finally, we identify several major research challenges in terms of market design, control algorithms, and security, as well as research directions to tackle them.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Digital Transformation in Industry
Additive Manufacturing and 3D Printing Technologies
Francesco Longo, Giovanni Mirabelli, Vittorio Solina, Laura Belli · 14 authors
The recent COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted all the weaknesses of manufacturing systems and supply chains. In this challenging context, smallholders have faced several crises mainly related to the difficulty of finding manpower for harvesting activities and the impossibility of distributing food, due to the forced closure of many distribution channels. The main consequences were lost sales and wasted food. With the aim of increasing the responsiveness of smallholders in the face of COVID-like crises, this paper provides an overview of methodologies and approaches currently available in the literature in terms of: ICT tools, blockchain-based solutions, business models, sustainability-oriented frameworks, simulation models. The analysis of the literature provides two main outputs: (1) a list of challenges to be faced in the coming years to improve the working conditions of smallholders, (2) the definition of future research developments, which mainly concern the design of an ICT platform, which integrates multiple technological aspects.
Given the challenge of manufacturing data silos and information credibility issues in traditional aviation suppliers’ result-oriented management approach, this paper proposes a blockchain-based aviation supplier manufacturing process quality data-sharing platform. Firstly, the paper introduces the possibility of integrating manufacturing supply chain quality management with blockchain technology. Secondly, the quality and data sharing platform architecture of the production process of new aviation suppliers is presented based on quality state and island kinds of aviation suppliers. Then, a detailed method for the implementation of quality and data security sharing is proposed to support the sharing platform’s real-time and orderly operation. Build critical technologies such as manufacturing quality data block packaging models, data storage security sharing, and supplier assessment models on this foundation. Finally, depending on data collection of supplier product production processes to shared application practices based on a specific aircraft industrial park under the supervision of the platform architecture and technology. The application platform integrates the data supply and request components, providing practical and intelligent sharing solutions for airlines’ product quality data.
Production control is an essential component of a production system used to monitor and manage production orders. Centrally controlled production systems rely on basic data management, such as storing the bill of materials and required work schedules. Components of customer orders are added to generate the corresponding production orders. However, this type of production control can pose serious problems in case of unforeseen events such as machine failure or changing customer requirements during production. In such scenarios, costly and time-consuming re-scheduling becomes necessary, which endangers the company's competitive position and leads to data retention issues. This paper introduces a new method of production control based on the concept of smart orders. Smart orders use smart contracts for autonomous routing based on programmed information in the source code, enabling self-control through the production system. Smart contracts are transaction programs that work with ‘if-then logic”, allowing for partially flexible process schedules and reducing the need for human intervention. The smart order uses the functionalities of blockchain technology, such as security, transparency, and immutability, to ensure the integrity of production data. The paper concludes by presenting the expected value propositions of smart order-based production control on the production system. Depending on the production control system used, companies can integrate the results presented in this paper into their own blockchain implementation strategy.
Yash Madhwal, Yury Yanovich, S. Balachander, K. Harshini Poojaa · 6 authors
The manufacturing industry comprises various departments, and the supply chain is crucial in ensuring uninterrupted commodity flow during production. However, traditional supply chain systems face transparency, data visibility, and security challenges. This scientific article presents a Proof of Concept (PoC) that explores integrating IoT devices with blockchain technology to address these issues. Our PoC focuses on enabling IoT devices to autonomously sign transactions to the blockchain using IoT devices’ authenticated private keys, eliminating the need for external wallets. This approach offers scalability, efficiency, and real-time responsiveness benefits. Leveraging the devices’ transaction processing capabilities enhances scalability, allowing for a higher transaction volume. Automation of transaction signing streamlines the process, improving efficiency and eliminating delays caused by human interaction. Real-time responsiveness is ensured, eliminating any latency introduced by external wallets. We provide a detailed workflow of the use case and simulation results, making our research findings more accessible. Through this work, we demonstrate the feasibility and advantages of this method in scenarios where continuous, automated interaction with the blockchain is required through IoT devices. The PoC code is publicly available on GitHub.
Dimitris Mourtzis, John Angelopoulos, Nikos Panopoulos
Following the technological advances, new personalized, and immersive services, based on recent developments in virtual co-existence, i.e., Metaverse, new opportunities for teaching methodologies and practices for reskilling educators and students emerge. However, the Metaverse infrastructure is still in its infancy. Thus, researchers, educators, and digital designers have an opportunity to lead the way. To realize the Metaverse potential as a three-dimensional, global, interconnected, immersive and real-time online world, new ways of connecting the physical world with Extended Reality (XR) experiences are required. Online learning has become mainstream, and Education is mainly focusing on the integration of immersive technologies into academic curricula to make learning more engaging and conceivable. Thus, Metaverse is one of those focal points for educators to create 3D virtual classrooms. Additionally, heading towards Industry 5.0, huge amount of personal data is continuously uploaded to the Cloud. As such, Blockchain is required to improve the quality of online education by enhancing accreditation processes, including security issues and scalability. Therefore, in this research work the design and development of collaborative platform for the design of Product-Service Systems (PSS), encapsulating a plethora of virtual tools is presented. Ultimately, with the integration of Metaverse, Blockchain and their accompanying digital technologies, young engineers can coexist with their educators, industrial partners, and their colleagues, in an attempt to achieve greater engagement, learn by doing, and get familiar with foreign and multi-cultural educational systems. Consequently, the presented framework promotes design education based on the collaboration provided by Metaverse, and academic credits are granted for young engineers through the Blockchain framework.
Yusra Abdulrahman, Edin Arnautović, Vladimir Parezanović, Davor Svetinović
This paper presents an exhaustive investigation into the potential of integrating blockchain and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies within aerospace engineering, explicitly emphasizing supply chain management and operational efficiency. Given the decentralized nature of blockchain, it has the potential to enhance diverse facets of an aircraft’s lifecycle management significantly. At the same time, AI stands to revolutionize predictive supply chain models and structural fault detection. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the current state, potential applications, challenges, and future research directions in this field based on an analysis of previous relevant literature. Further, it compares blockchain technology against traditional record management systems, underlining its data storage, security, transparency, and traceability advantages. Although these technologies promise significant advancements, many legal, regulatory, and technological readiness issues need addressing for broader acceptance within the industry. The findings highlight the importance of targeted research and development to unfold an array of new applications, driving innovation in aerospace engineering. This paper serves as a comprehensive survey for researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and industry stakeholders, illustrating the transformative potential of AI and blockchain in the aerospace sector.
With the transition to Industry 4.0 factories have achieved significant gains in production with respect to quality, reliability, flexibility, and utilization of resources.Nonetheless, there are open challenges that shall be addressed when it comes to traceability of defects and automation actions that are interrelated with both optimization and security aspects along the production chain.Current industrial solutions use a centralized client-server architecture; however, if the central authority is undermined, the system can fail.In this regard, one of the most promising technologies is blockchain, as it is a decentralized technology based on a peer-to-peer network instead of a client-server model.In this paper, we propose a blockchain framework based on Ethereum platform, which is applied in three different production lines namely for antenna manufacturing, microelectronics, and elevators.Initially, we have three different private Ethereum networks, for each factory, with the Proof-of-Authority consensus mechanism.We have developed smart contracts for defect detection as well as firmware update for production equipment.As shown through experiments, the developed smart contracts have certain advantages compared to existing practises in terms of traceability and cyber-security.Furthermore, we have developed a blockchain API that connects the proposed framework with an industrial middleware platform and the overall OPTIMAI Industry 4.0 ecosystem.Experiments for each production line showcase the potential of our approach and it gains in terms of security, storage, traceability, and transparency.
Blockchain, smart contracts, and the Internet of Things (IoT) are essential technologies for the business process re-engineering of supply chains in the era of Industry 4.0. The agricultural food supply chain is one of the research areas where these disruptive technologies can play a crucial role in automating business processes, providing real-time goods monitoring, and securing transactions. With the help of blockchain, smart contracts, and the IoT, a product’s health and environment can be monitored throughout the supply chain. In this study, we have critically examined the relevance of these technologies through various activities of the agriculture supply chain using the approach of Business Process Modeling (BPM). The blockchain and smart contracts-based findings of the BPM were then incorporated along various layers of the Reference Architecture for Modeling Industry 4.0 (RAMI 4.0). This enabled us to introduce the IoT, blockchain, and smart contract based smart agriculture framework, Agri-4-All. Agri-4-All can be used to automate the intra-organizational and inter-organizational processes of the agricultural supply chain. We developed, deployed, and tested the intra-organizational and inter-organizational smart contracts written in the Solidity language for a typical scenario related to the agriculture supply chain. Our hybrid smart algorithms implemented using Ganache and Truffle suite reduce the gas cost in our proposed intra-organizational smart contracts by 13.89 times as compared to the traditional smart contract-based model.
Automating industrial tasks has become critical for organizations due to the inefficiencies and risks associated with conventional procedures. The proliferation of connected devices and machines brings forth a range of security concerns, including data tampering and unauthorized access. Establishing confidential and trustworthy communication between these devices becomes particularly difficult as they rely on the open channel of the Internet. Numerous established security measures, such as antivirus software, access control systems, intrusion detection systems (IDS), and intrusion prevention systems (IPS), have been identified in the literature as facing issues like centralized vulnerabilities, latency challenges, reliability issues, and single points of failure. As technology advances rapidly, the convergence of emerging technologies holds immense potential to revolutionize industrial automation. Among these promising technologies, blockchain and 6G stand out for their immense potential. With its decentralized and tamperproof nature, blockchain has disrupted various sectors, while 6G offers unprecedented connectivity and lightning-fast data transfer speeds. Motivated by these developments, this paper explores the potential impact of integrating blockchain technology with 6G in industrial automation, paving the way for the future of smart factories and intelligent supply chains. Our proposed work aims to provide a holistic understanding of this emerging amalgamation’s key benefits, challenges, offered solutions, and prospects.
Spyridon Georg Koustas, Max Jalowski, Tobias Reichenstein, Sascha Julian Oks
As manufacturing firms increasingly utilize IIoT technologies and sensor data is integrated into their processes, centralized architectures and the expansion of value creation networks pose challenges regarding data integrity and transparency. This offers an application context for the blockchain and smart contract technologies. Through a design science research approach a prototypical instantiation in form of a private Ethereum blockchain with RFID sensors as data inputs and ERC-721 tokens is created. The artifact is implemented into an industrial demonstrator, where the immutable tracking of workpieces during their production processes and the algorithm execution time are evaluated in trial runs.
A blockchain is an open, distributed ledger that can record transactions between two parties in an efficient, verifiable, and permanent way. Once recorded in a block, the transaction data cannot be altered retroactively. Moreover, smart contracts can be put in place to ensure that any new data added to the blockchain respects the terms of an agreement between the involved parties. As such, the blockchain becomes the single source of truth for all stakeholders in the system. These characteristics make blockchain technology especially useful in the context of Industry 4.0, distributed in nature, but with important requirements of trust and accountability among the large number of devices involved in the collaboration. In this chapter, we will see concrete scenarios where cyber-physical systems (CPSs) can benefit from blockchain technology, especially focusing on how blockchain works in practice, and which are the design and architectural trade-offs we should keep in mind when adopting this technology both for the design and operation of CPSs.
Abstract Blockchain (BC) represents a disruptive technology that has been extensively used to ensure immutability of digital transactions. Starting as an underlying mechanism in the digital currency sector, it has been applicable in a wide range of sectors and application domains. Agricultural sector represents a sector of significance for overall sustainability challenges that is benefiting from digitalization and technological evolution and the enforcement of Industry 4.0 paradigm shift towards precision agriculture. Introduction of Internet of Things, and Cyber-Physical Systems increase overall complexity, with Big Data analysis and Machine Learning technologies providing innovative applications. BC appears to be a promising technology for agriculture providing mechanisms for tracing of products and overall agricultural supply chain (SC) management from the farm to the fork. Authors investigate the challenges and open issues for the application of BC in agriculture performing a state of the art analysis along the PESTELS framework. A large number of challenges including technological ones, creates big research potential for the evolution of the area.
Abstract The digitalisation of fashion supply chain transparency has gained increased attention in recent years. Technology solutions that have arisen based on advanced technologies and Web3 include smart tags, forensic tracers and blockchain platformisation. Whereby current reports discuss supply chain transparency from the perspective of the data, technical solutions and policy [1, 2], little attention is given to the fashion firms that are to adopt these technologies. Finding themselves in the midst of the supply chain transparency polemic, small to medium brands are still at a loss as to transformation and communication strategies [3]. This paper examines the standpoint of the small-scale brand, its challenges and needs in the face of digital transformation and lays the groundwork for the development of Web3 technology adoption guidelines–that can ultimately form, not only part of their implementation but also their communication strategy. Applying the theoretical framework of organisational theory, it provides evidence of successful practice through case study methodology. The study contributes to knowledge of organisational theory in the context of adjusting to rapid and complex change triggered by both external and internal demands for adopting advanced technology.
Amer A. Hijazi, Srinath Perera, Ali Mohammed Alashwal, Rodrigo N. Calheiros
Blockchain technology has been proposed as a potential solution for coordinating information and trust to aid the development of a single source of the truth data model, going beyond peer-to-peer cash transactions. It is, therefore, argued that the construction supply chain (CSC) will resolve issues related to the lack of reliable platforms for construction and asset management operations once blockchain technology and Building Information Modelling (BIM) are integrated. Though there is no longer any debate about the importance of integrating blockchain technology with BIM, there is still a lack of academic literature on its proof of concept. This study aims to create a thorough proof of concept for integrating blockchain technology and BIM for supply chain data delivery. It demonstrated a step-by-step methodology starting from understanding the current business scenario and proposing logical system architecture, followed by selecting a blockchain platform, designing system architecture related to technologies, prototyping, and evaluating through a virtual business scenario. The software prototype presented in this paper helps establish the technological viability of a single source of the truth data model for integrating blockchain technology and BIM. The supply chain data delivery for handover was considered in this software prototype. However, the process used to create this software prototype can be replicated in future work on blockchain technology-based built environment applications or digital transformation in the built environment research.
In cyber–physical–social systems, smart manufacturing has to overcome challenges, such as uncertainty, diversity, complexity in modeling, long-delayed responses to market changes, and human engineer dependency. DeFACT is a framework of parallel manufacturing in ManuVerse where the Decentralized Autonomous Organization-based interactions between parallel workers consisting of robotic, digital, and human workers are elaborated to transform from professional division to real-virtual division. In DeFACT, human workers are only responsible for 5% physical and mental work that is complex and creative, and the robotic and digital workers can take care of the rest. The perceptual and cognitive intelligence of digital workers are intensified by a manufacturing foundation model (MF-PC), where calibration and certification (C&C), and verification and validation (V&V) guarantee not only the accuracy of task models, but also the interpretability and controllability of feature learning. As a case study, the workflow of customized shoes of SANBODY Technology Company is illustrated to show how DeFACT breaks the time and space constraints, avoids production waste caused by aesthetic discrepancies with consumers, and truly realizes flexible manufacturing.
During the past decades, the global manufacturing industries have been reshaped by the rapid development of advanced technologies, such as cyber-physical systems, Internet of Things, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, cloud/edge computing, smart sensing, advanced robotics, blockchain/distributed ledger technology, etc [...]
Maria Elisabete Gomes Ramos, Ana Azevedo, Deolinda Meira, Mariana Curado Malta
Digital Transformation (DT) has become an important issue for organisations. It is proven that DT fuels Digital Innovation in organisations. It is well-known that technologies and practices such as distributed ledger technologies, open source, analytics, big data, and artificial intelligence (AI) enhance DT. Among those technologies, AI provides tools to support decision-making and automatically decide. Cooperatives are organisations with a mutualistic scope and are characterised by having participatory cooperative governance due to the principle of democratic control by the members. In a context where DT is here to stay, where the dematerialisation of processes can bring significant advantages to any organisation, this article presents a critical reflection on the dangers of using AI technologies in cooperatives. We base this reflection on the Portuguese cooperative code. We emphasise that this code is not very different from the ones of other countries worldwide as they are all based on the Statement of Cooperative Identity defined by the International Cooperative Alliance. We understand that we cannot stop the entry of AI technologies into the cooperatives. Therefore, we present a framework for using AI technologies in cooperatives to avoid damaging the principles and values of this type of organisations.
Abstract In recent years, many core technologies of Industry 4.0 have advanced significantly, particularly the integration of big data technology and cloud manufacturing (CMfg). The decentralization and traceability features of blockchain technology (BCT) provide an effective solution to provide trusted resource service in CMfg. Service composition is a core issue of CMfg to increase the value of digital assets. However, existing research on service composition based on BCT suffers from both the blockchain proof-of-work (PoW) mechanism and the service composition problem need to consume large computational overheads, as well as the blockchain fork problem affecting the system’s reliability, which reduces the usefulness of these schemes. To solve these problems, this paper proposes a novel multi-objective service composition architecture for blockchain-based CMfg (MOSC-BBCM). In MOSC-BBCM, first, a blockchain-chained storage structure is designed for the actual manufacturing cloud service constraint and scale dynamic changes, which can fully use the historical service information and accelerate the search for high-quality solutions. Second, to reduce the squandered computing resources in the PoW, a mining mechanism based on multi-objective service composition and optimal selection is proposed, where miners competitively solve a nondeterminate polynomial-hard problem to replace the mathematical puzzle. Finally, an incentive mechanism based on the environment selection method is proposed, which can avoid the fork problem while distributing on a labor basis. The effectiveness of the proposed MOSC-BBCM is verified in simulated numerical experiments of CMfg, which shows that the architecture provides a flexible and configurable scheme for blockchain-based CMfg with high availability.