Blockchain Papers

Johan Wenngren, Martin Lundgren, Åsa Ericson, Johan Lugnet

The following topics are dealt with: production engineering computing; industrial robots; industrial manipulators; robot programming; computerised numerical control; control engineering computing; intelligent robots; human-robot interaction; factory automation; maximum power point trackers.

Manuel Sánchez

Because of the digital revolution, also known as Industry 3.0, the boundaries between the physical and digital worlds are shrinking to give life to a more interconnected and smart factories. These factories allow employees, machines, processes, and products to interact oriented to provide a better organization of all the productive means, empowering the entire company itself to achieve higher levels of efficiency and productivity. These technologies are profoundly transforming our society, allowing customizing everything in detail, reducing goods and services costs, transforming worker's and job’s conditions for safety and security, among others. In that sense, Industry 3.0 acted as a catalyst that promoted new production mechanisms, which originated a new industrial revolution known as Industry 4.0. The concept of Industry 4.0, is used to designate the new generation of connected, robotics, and intelligent factories. Fundamentally, the vision of Industry 4.0 is to give smart capabilities to the production and physical operations to create a more holistic and better-connected ecosystem. One crucial aspect to consider, regarding the idea of the Industry 4.0 concept, is related to integrability and interoperability of the actors involved in manufacturing processes. It means that people, things, processes, and data have to be able not only to make decisions for themselves and to carry out their work in a more autonomous way (independence) but, also, the self-management of the whole factory (need to promote integrability and interoperability). The previous statement implies that the production processes’ actors should be able to autonomously negotiate in order to reach agreements linked to achieve both individual and collective production goals. In that sense, Industry 4.0 represents not only a new way to produce goods and services but also a crucial integration challenge of the actors involved in the manufacturing processes that need connection, communication, coordination, cooperation, and collaboration (denoted as 5C) capabilities that allow them to comply with the vision of Industry 4.0. Principally, this thesis aims at empowering processes management for Industry 4.0, proposing a stack of five levels, denoted as 5C. The 5C stack levels represent a way to deal with integration and interoperability challenges so that they can be solved incrementally at each level. From this perspective, we must start solving connection and communication issues as a first step to promote more elaborated organization processes like coordination, cooperation, and collaboration. Mainly, the 5C denote the elements needed to allow autonomous integration and interoperability of actors in Industry 4.0. From this point of view, in this thesis project, we present a first contribution that is oriented to deal with the integration challenges regarding the Industry 4.0 context at the level of connection and communication. This solution is based in a Multi-agent system in which the physical elements of the system are characterized virtually as agents. Notably, the use of Multi-agent systems allows creating an intelligent environment dotted with characteristics of autonomy, decentralization, self-organization, self-direction, standardized protocol, and other properties of Multi-agent systems. Moreover, the proposed solution allows actors to extend their limited capabilities with service deployed through the Internet, as an intent to automatize, optimize, and in more mature stages, transform any environment into a fully integrated, automated, and intelligent environment. Consequently, the proposed architecture will be evaluated and compared to previous researches in this field. In the second place, we will solve some integration challenges of Industry 4.0 at the level of coordination, cooperation, and collaboration. In this case, we design a framework for autonomous integration of actors in Industry 4.0, to allow them to autonomously coordinate, cooperate, and collaborate. This framework uses technologies like the Internet of Everything, Everything mining, and Autonomic computing. Next, we design some autonomic cycles of data analytics tasks, oriented to enable autonomous coordination in manufacturing processes. Fundamentally, these data analytics tasks create the knowledge bases needed in a production environment to support self-planning, self-manage, self-supervising, self-healing, etc. to the manufacturing process. Finally, we implement an autonomous cycle of data analytics tasks for self-supervising, using several Everything-mining techniques over data sources corresponding to a real manufacturing process. It defines a self-value-driven supervisory system, according to the classification made by Xu et al. (2017), that can process and verify the functionalities and applicability of our framework in manufacturing processes. Moreover, the self-supervising system developed in this thesis project is compared to other research works.

Shengjing Sun, Xiaochen Zheng, Javier Villalba-Díez, Joaquín Ordieres‐Meré

Information-intensive transformation is vital to realize the Industry 4.0 paradigm, where processes, systems, and people are in a connected environment. Current factories must combine different sources of knowledge with different technological layers. Taking into account data interconnection and information transparency, it is necessary to enhance the existing frameworks. This paper proposes an extension to an existing framework, which enables access to knowledge about the different data sources available, including data from operators. To develop the interoperability principle, a specific proposal to provide a (public and encrypted) data management solution to ensure information transparency is presented, which enables semantic data treatment and provides an appropriate context to allow data fusion. This proposal is designed also considering the Privacy by Design option. As a proof of application case, an implementation was carried out regarding the logistics of the delivery of industrial components in the construction sector, where different stakeholders may benefit from shared knowledge under the proposed architecture.

Prince Waqas Khan, Yung-Cheol Byun, Namje Park

Agriculture and livestock play a vital role in social and economic stability. Food safety and transparency in the food supply chain are a significant concern for many people. Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain are gaining attention due to their success in versatile applications. They generate a large amount of data that can be optimized and used efficiently by advanced deep learning (ADL) techniques. The importance of such innovations from the viewpoint of supply chain management is significant in different processes such as for broadened visibility, provenance, digitalization, disintermediation, and smart contracts. This article takes the secure IoT-blockchain data of Industry 4.0 in the food sector as a research object. Using ADL techniques, we propose a hybrid model based on recurrent neural networks (RNN). Therefore, we used long short-term memory (LSTM) and gated recurrent units (GRU) as a prediction model and genetic algorithm (GA) optimization jointly to optimize the parameters of the hybrid model. We select the optimal training parameters by GA and finally cascade LSTM with GRU. We evaluated the performance of the proposed system for a different number of users. This paper aims to help supply chain practitioners to take advantage of the state-of-the-art technologies; it will also help the industry to make policies according to the predictions of ADL.

Nuthalapati Sudha, Raju Ramakrishna Gondkar

The paper provides a modified framework for Agile software development with the insertion of Blockchain in its framework. The existing work using Blockchain as a technology in Agile Software development is limited. The Blockchain technology was first used for developing crypto currency. The technology uses decentralized and distributed ledger concept. Agile technology being a key method of software development has been used for software developments that have little understanding of the software requirements and places where the requirements change very frequently. It is often seen that in the industry it becomes difficult to track the changes and ownership of suggestions in the agile team is a major concern. Considering the number of stake holders and the rapidity of changes in the development process, blockchain is analyzed as a method of tracking and following the responsibility needed in development. The fact that not much work exists in this area encourages us to take up this research.

Nursena Bayğın, Mehmet Bayğın, Mehmet Karaköse

Today, thanks to the developing technology, mass production technology is progressing very fast. With these systems, which aim to meet the increasing customer demands correctly, effectively and efficiently, it is aimed to produce customer-specific products. In this method called mass customization, customers can customize the product they demand and create it according to their personal tastes. In this study, the mass customization concept, which is one of the current production technologies, is modeled by using blockchain. In the proposed system, a blockchain-based smart contract was created to bring together the parties and establish a healthy communication. In addition, it is aimed to produce more effective products with the proposed method. By providing a simulation environment for the products to be produced, it is presented to the users' information and a feedback system is created. Thus, a consensus-based production model is being built.

Weihua Liu, Jiahui Zhang, Shuang Wei, Di Wang

In smart-logistics ecological chains led by e-commerce platforms, the organisational efficiency has become an important indicator to measure the ecological chain’s development. However, no scientific theoretical framework exists regarding the factors affecting such organisational efficiency. This paper adopts a multi-case study method to research four e-commerce platforms in China and investigate the current situation and development of smart-logistics ecological chains. Through interviews and analysis, the research proposes a theoretical framework of factors influencing the organisational efficiency about smart-logistics ecological chains led by an e-commerce platform. First, it reveals that under e-commerce platform leadership, the smart-logistics ecological chain’s organisational efficiency directly relates to two factors: the eco-chain’s technological innovation capability and contract fulfilment. Second, national policies, consumer demands, the competition among ecological chains, and Information-sharing will indirectly affect the smart-logistics ecological chain’s organisational efficiency. Third, enhancing the smart-logistics ecological chain’s technological innovation capability positively impacts its contract fulfilment.

Da-Yin Liao

Contemporary 300mm semiconductor manufacturing systems have highly automated and digitalized cyber-physical integration. They suffer from the profound problems of integrating large, centralized legacy systems with small islands of automation. With the recent advances in disruptive technologies, semiconductor manufacturing has faced dramatic pressures to reengineer its automation and computer integrated systems. This paper proposes a Distributed-Ledger, Edge-Computing Architecture (DLECA) for automation and computer integration in semiconductor manufacturing. Based on distributed ledger and edge computing technologies, DLECA establishes a decentralized software framework where manufacturing data are stored in distributed ledgers and processed locally by executing smart contracts at the edge nodes. We adopt an important topic of automation and computer integration for semiconductor research &development (R&D) operations as the study vehicle to illustrate the operational structure and functionality, applications, and feasibility of the proposed DLECA software framework.

Tobias Guggenberger, André Schweizer, Nils Urbach

Supply chain literature has long recognized the benefits of information sharing. Researchers and practitioners see high potential for improving processes, enabling new replenishment policies, and enhancing supply chain integration. Even though information technology represents a vital role as a driver and a success factor for implementing information sharing, established technologies still do not reflect the highly decentralized and fragmented characteristics of complex and often global supply chains. Early research shows that blockchain might be an enabler for the supply chain management. However, little is known about how blockchain might improve information sharing for complex, multitier supply chains. Therefore, this article aims at analyzing how and to what extent blockchain can facilitate information sharing for vendor managed inventory by designing a software prototype based on Hyperledger Fabric using the design science research approach. This research took place in close cooperation with a leading German healthcare technology manufacturer, which allowed us to base our study both on literature and practical insights. With our results, we contribute to the supply chain knowledge base by introducing the decentralized information hub model, describing how companies utilize decentralized technologies, such as blockchain, to facilitate information sharing.

Ibrar Yaqoob, Khaled Salah, Mueen Uddin, Raja Jayaraman · 6 authors

The advent of blockchain technology can refine the concept of DTs by ensuring transparency, decentralized data storage, data immutability, and peer-to-peer communication in industrial sectors. A DT is an integrated multiphysics, multiscale, and probabilistic simulation, representation, and mirroring of a real-world physical component. The DTs help to visualize designs in 3D, perform tests and simulations virtually prior to creation of any physical component, and consequently play a vital role in sustaining and maintaining Industry 4.0. It is anticipated that DTs will become prevalent in the foreseeable future because they can be used for configuration, monitoring, diagnostics, and prognostics. This article envisages how blockchain can reshape and transform DTs to bring about secure manufacturing that guarantees traceability, compliance, authenticity, quality, and safety. We discuss several benefits of employing blockchain in DTs. We taxonomize the DTs literature based on key parameters (e.g., DTs levels, design phases, industrial use cases, key objectives, enabling technologies, and core applications). We provide insights into ongoing progress made towards DTs by presenting recent synergies and case studies. Finally, we discuss open challenges that serve as future research directions.

Sivaganesan D.

The ground work for establishing the industrial 4.0 age involves the tiered architectures that are made up of multiple planes encompassed with the physical things that are embedded with internet capabilities. This infrastructure enables an incorporation of the various functions that are necessary in a manufacturing industry to enhance the efficiency of the industry, and contrivance a highly supple and a self-organizing industry that is smart. On the other hand it becomes essential to preserve the information's safely as many internet enabled devices are utilized and more networks are formed for the proper incorporation of the various activities taking place. Since the conventional methods are inadequate the block chain method was most preferred due to its transparency and highly reliable and expedient services. To further structure a tamper proof network the blockchain is built with the smart contract laid on the system providing the impermeable authenticity on the industrial data transferred by securing the information's against the authentication that is anonymous. The performance of the system is validated to on the basis of security provided on the transactions made, and the cost spent on the proposed design

Tadas Limba, Andrejus Novikovas, Andrius Stankevičius, Antanas Andrulevičius · 5 authors

Two mainstream topics have been widely discussed over the past few years: ways to reduce the human impact on nature and the way that the industrial revolution 4.0 changes industries. The aim of this research topic is to analyse the positive and negative factors of big data implementation in the sector of cryptocurrency (as part of the industrial revolution 4.0) and in the sector of municipal waste management. The analysis reveals the differences and similarities between the cryptocurrency and municipal waste management sectors in the context of big data. The findings are significant for the estimation of the technological development of digitalized and non-digitalized sectors.

Fabian Dietrich

ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Globalisation, shorter product life cycles, and increasing product varieties have led to complex
\nsupply chains. At the same time, there is a growing interest by customers and governments in
\nhaving a greater transparency of brands, manufacturers, and producers throughout the supply
\nchain. Due to the complex structure of collaborative manufacturing networks, the increase in
\nsupply chain transparency is a challenge for manufacturing companies. Distributed ledger
\ntechnologies offer an innovative solution to increase the transparency, security, authenticity,
\nand auditability of products. However, there are still uncertainties when applying the
\ndistributed ledger technology to manufacturing scenarios and thus enable all stakeholders to
\ntrace the audit history of each component of an assembled product. This research work
\nproposes a framework to increase the transparency and auditability of products in collaborative
\nmanufacturing networks by adopting the distributed ledger technology. The framework
\nconsiders the challenges of manufacturing supply chains with the opportunities of distributed
\nledger technologies and combines them in a conceptual implementation process of supply chain
\nmanagement systems. In this context, each component of a product is represented by a unique
\nvirtual identity generated by distributed ledger-based smart contracts. These virtual identities
\ncan only be sent and merged if defined conditions specified in smart contracts are met. This
\nenables all physical processes and their dependencies to be mapped in the distributed ledger.
\nThe results, based on a practical implementation of the framework, show that a transparent
\nauditability of assembled products and all the components they consist of can be achieved.
\nApplications based on the proposed framework can currently only enable real-time tracking
\nreliably in permissioned networks. The implementation on a permissionless network provides
\nfull transparency for all stakeholders including the customer, while the implementation on a
\npermissioned network only provides a restricted transparency for the customers.

Gordon Lemme, Diana Lemme, Kilian Armin Nölscher, Steffen Ihlenfeldt

In a global sales market with networked production steps and increasing complex machine tools, scaling service ecosystems for production provide an adequate solution for handling the generated data. The existing sensor equipment at current and the extension possibility by the System-of-Systems approach for existing machine tools can offer value-added services by the smart handling of production-related data. It is important to make these data validatable and exchangeable, taking into account to different protection goals. The trust of the individual actors in such a volatile value chain and the different (partly cross-border) value creation partners play an important role. The participation of a large number of these actors creates an attractive overall system (ecosystem) with lots of services and network effects. Concerning data security there are numerous aspects, which have not been adequately answered or taken into account in the use of a service ecosystem in the production environment. The paper discusses a distributed ecosystem for production on a distributed ledger-based service ecosystem, in which services can be mapped in the machine tool environment (e.g. calibration). This technology can be used for secure data exchange in order to discuss traceability and unchangeability of data while maintaining data sovereignty.

Xiaobao Zhu, Jing Shi, Fengjie Xie, Rouqi Song

No abstract is available for this record.

Ehsan Aghamohammadzadeh, Omid Fatahi Valilai

In the near future, manufacturing industries will be mostly recognised with characteristics like IoT, and massive data transactions. To fulfil these characteristics, paradigms like Cloud manufacturing, Industry 4.0 and smart factory have passed their preliminary steps to become the primary inspirations. Considering the nature of Cloud manufacturing which consists of a vast number of service providers and Service demanders being introduced to the manufacturing cloud, service composition problem is introduced. However, there is a big challenge for fulfilling the dynamic behaviour of parameters which change rapidly over time in the service composition problem. This paper challenges the centralised mechanism of service composition problem and introduces a novel platform entitled Blockchain-based service composition model (Block-SC) based on the Blockchain technology. Block-SC as a novel manufacturing architecture conquers the centralised mechanism by dividing the original service composition problem into multiple sub-problems each of which contains a small fraction of the service/task pool. The capabilities of the proposed platform are remarkable from two perspectives; first, it provides an effective mechanism for collaboration of service composition service providers with a service-oriented approach and from the second perspective, the optimality of service composition problem is profoundly affected considering the dynamic behaviour of Cloud manufacturing.

Xiaobao Zhu, Jing Shi, Samuel H. Huang, Bin Zhang

No abstract is available for this record.

Özden Tozanlı, Elif Kongar, Surendra M. Gupta

Growing environmental awareness and widening extended producer responsibility have heightened the need for economically, environmentally, and socially sustainable business strategies levered by digital technologies. As an extension, various take-back policies focusing on product waste and recovery are put in place by the high-tech manufacturing industry. With an attempt to increase sales while ensuring the environmental sustainability of products, trade-in programmes that incentivize consumers to exchange used goods for new and most recent technology products became a value-adding strategy for businesses. Due to the high unpredictability in the quality of returned devices however, determining trade-in margins is a challenging task for original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). This inevitably reveals the need for incorporating intelligent technologies into the formation of manufacturing and logistics architectures to simultaneously preserve OEMs profitability and ensure the sustainable development of the closed-loop supply chain activities. With this motivation, this study presents the use of IoT-embedded products in a blockchain-enabled disassembly-to-order system to determine the optimal trade-in-to-upgrade policy. A discrete-event simulation model is developed to obtain the expected cost of the disassembly-to-order system. Optimal incentives for varying product qualities are then computed by utilising this cost in the trade-in policy model.

Chunyang Yu, Xuanlin Jiang, Shiqiang Yu, Cheng Yang

No abstract is available for this record.

Joseph E. Kasten

This article presents the results of a systematic review of the literature pertaining to the use of blockchain technology in the engineering and manufacturing activities. The uses of blockchain have been growing quickly in the literature, and this fast pace can make it difficult for researchers to keep abreast of the state of the art. Using a systematic approach to search the primary electronic indices, the compiled list of papers is then analyzed and a number of themes are identified. The results of this article suggest that the literature surrounding blockchain and the engineering/manufacturing industry can be categorized into three primary groups: blockchain to protect data validity, blockchain to enhance inter and intraorganizational communications, and blockchain to increase the efficiency of the manufacturing process. Within each top-level theme, there exist some subthemes that provide a more finely defined categorization of the papers contained in that theme. These subthemes include specific areas of blockchain application such as additive manufacturing, cloud manufacturing, and building information models (BIMs). For each group of papers identified, each study is discussed briefly. This article concludes with a set of conclusions about the current state of the literature and suggestions for further research directions. The primary contribution of this article is to provide a foundation upon which additional research can be accomplished as well as to provide a resource for practitioners to help them understand the current state of the industry and help them determine how blockchain might be beneficial to their organization.

Srinath Perera, Samudaya Nanayakkara, Navodana Rodrigo, Sepani Senaratne · 5 authors

No abstract is available for this record.

Ai Gu, Zhenyu Yin, Chuanyu Cui, Yue Li

This paper proposes a functional safety and information security protection mechanism based on blockchain technology. The design of the basic level and integration level blockchain structure of CPS distributed architecture and related functional safety and information security measures are introduced. An effective communication judgment mechanism based on functional safety error threshold is proposed, which is stored and judged by smart contract. And a refund transaction with a clock is proposed to ensure the effective execution of the functional safety error threshold mechanism. The article takes cyber physical machine tool system as an example to describe the SIL judgment method of CPS physical equipment and functional safety loop and combines SIL with fault diagnosis and risk protection. Finally, the rationality of our proposed mechanism is proved by information security, functional security, real-time and maintainability.

Sebastian Richter, Lena Schmidt, Erich Heumüller

Cloud Manufacturing is a manufacturing paradigm that focuses on collaboration and resource utilization. Until recently, little research has been done to combine the perspectives of cloud manufacturing and digital platform ecosystems. In the cloud manufacturing paradigm, the cloud coordinator takes up the dual role of a matchmaker and a platform owner, though, so it is interesting to research how any power dominance of the platform owner can be avoided. To do so, three dimensions of platform governance suggested by Tiwana 2014 – pricing policies, decision rights, and control – were considered in this contribution to recommend a fair value distribution mechanism for platform ecosystems in cloud manufacturing. Requirements for such a solution are formulated in this contribution and design patterns satisfying these requirements are derived. We propose using tokens administrated by distributed ledger technologies and smart contracts to enable a special split revenue scheme that satisfies the

Jiahe Xu, Yuan Tian, Tinghuai Ma, Najla Al-Nabhan

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) plays an important role in the development of smart factories. However, the existing IIoT systems are prone to suffering from single points of failure and unable to provide stable service. Meanwhile, with the increase of node scale and network quantity, the maintenance cost presents to be higher. Such a disadvantage can be effectively compensated by the features such as security, privacy, non-tamperability and distributed deployment supported by the blockchain. In this paper, first, an intelligent manufacturing security model based on blockchain was proposed. Due to the high power consumption and low throughput of the traditional blockchain, IoT devices with limited power consumption can not work independently. Therefore, in this paper, a new Merkle Patricia tree (MPT) was adopted to extend the blockchain structure and provide fast query of node status. Second, since the MPT does not support concurrent operation and the data operation performance deteriorates with high data volume, a lock-free concurrent and cache-based Merkle Patricia tree was proposed (CMPT) to support lock-free concurrent data operation, which can improve the data operation efficiency in multi-core system. The experimental results indicate that, compared with the original MPT, the CMPT proposed in this paper effectively reduced the time complexity of data insertion and data query and improved the speed of block construction and data query.