With Industry 4.0, IT infrastructure has started to be used more effectively in the manufacturing sector. Cyber physical systems, IoT, cloud manufacturing, big data are some of the technologies that make up the concept of Industry 4.0. These technologies have solved many problems in the manufacturing sector. One of these technologies, cloud manufacturing technology, has emerged with the idea of pay as you go. This technology has enabled manufacturing resources to be leased and shared on a global scale. However, it has problems arising from its central structure and the need for a reliable 3rd party. Reliability, security, continuity, scalability, data lock-in, single point failure, data manipulation are some of the main problems. Blockchain (BC) is a decentralized and distributed technology. The data stored on the BC network cannot be altered in any way. With these features, we believe that BC-supported cloud manufacturing systems can overcome the aforementioned problems and eliminates the need for a reliable 3rd party. Based on this belief, in this study the agreements and communication between the resource provider and the customer, which is one of the basic functions of cloud manufacturing platforms, are realized with a decentralized application using BC-based smart contracts (SCs). The designed application is called the decentralized cloud manufacturing application (DCMApp). DCMApp does not operate on a fully public BC network, it has a hybrid structure and uses the Ethereum network as a public BC network. These features make DCMApp different from other BC-based cloud manufacturing applications. DCMApp's hybrid structure has enabled more transparent, economic and safe manufacturing agreements. It is also possible to store agreements on the BC network at a low cost without installing any server infrastructure. The use of Ethereum network makes it almost impossible to manipulate agreements.
Industry 4.0, Internet of Things, Blockchain, and Business Analytics are the hot research topics and have attracted much attention from scholars and practitioners in recent years. In order to identify the forces driving their development and to promote their development, this paper reviews the extant studies on these topics. The review provides a comprehensive overview of state-of-the-art researches on Industry 4.0, Internet of Things, Blockchain, and Business Analytics. The results assist scholars to figure out the directions of future studies on these topics.
Ada Bagozi, Devis Bianchini, Valeria De Antonellis, Massimiliano Garda · 5 authors
Digital transformation and the adoption of ICT technologies in the factory of the future are growing faster and faster. In particular, data exploration methods and techniques are enabling the development of data-intensive Remote Monitoring Services for anomaly detection and predictive maintenance purposes. Remote Monitoring Services involve different actors across organizations. The Original Equipment Manufacturer explores high volume of data collected by sensors on the monitored machines to provide anomaly detection and predictive maintenance services. Insurance agencies may provide support to sustain maintenance costs. Spare parts suppliers can schedule the delivery of mechanical parts required for maintenance interventions. In this scenario, trust among participants becomes a critical issue. On the one hand, providers of anomaly detection and predictive maintenance services as well as insurance agencies must trust the way machines have been used by collecting and analysing sensors data. On the other hand, owners of monitored machines must trust the use of collected data to implement services, based on which maintenance costs are calculated. The goal of this paper is to leverage blockchain and smart contracts to ensure the required level of trust when implementing data exploration for Remote Monitoring Services. Events occurring on the monitored machines are stored as transactions in a blockchain-based system, to ensure non repudiation. Moreover, trust-demanding services are implemented as smart contracts, to guarantee the required level of trustworthiness among participants. The approach is integrated with a tool for data exploration in the digital factory, and has been validated taking into account performances and cost requirements.
Bio-drugs grow rapidly and become one of the key drivers of personalized medicine and advancement of life sciences. Driven by the unique challenges in biopharmaceutical supply chain management and also built on two-layer QuarkChain, we introduce a blockchain enabled interoperability framework and it has the reputation based Proof-of-Authority (PoA) smart contract. Given the real-time monitoring data streams of distributed systems, blockchain can improve the transparency and integrity of delivery processes. We introduce stochastic simulation to guide the blockchain design so that we can protect drug products from theft, temperature diversion, and counterfeiting, while improving the supply chain reliability, efficiency, and responsiveness. The preliminary empirical study demonstrates that our approach has promising performance.
IoT-enabled home appliances are still in their infancy, especially from the perspective of customers, which hinders widespread market penetration. To relieve this skeptical attitude of customers toward IoT appliances, it is important to design human-centric business models rather than corporate-centric ones. IoT ecosystems that make use of cognitive outputs from the social network of things can assist in the establishment of such business models. The contributions of this article are twofold. First, we propose a reference model that grants the absolute ownership of the fog-located digital twin (DT) of a home appliance to its owner and promotes human-centric services and applications on this twin by utilizing blockchains (BCs) and BC-enabled clouds. Second, by enabling customers to have absolute ownership rights over the fog-located DTs, the model paves the way for the liberalization of DTs as well as the appliances coupled to them, which is an important step in revealing the true value that underlies human-centricity and things-to-things collaboration.
Provenance and traceability are crucial in the food distribution and transportation network for ensuring integrity of food labeling and efficient management of quality and contamination issues. Significant issues in terms of cost, quality, and health issues can result without sufficient visibility. This article elaborates on the use of emerging blockchain technology to improve Internet of Things-enabled food logistics.
Charles Tim Batista Garrocho, Célio Márcio Soares Ferreira, Ailton Sávio Sacramento Júnior, Carlos Frederico Marcelo da Cunha Cavalcanti · 5 authors
Through the Internet of Industrial Things, significant investments in the industry are expected. In this new environment, machine-to-machine communication showed immediate potential. However, most communication implementations require a trusted intermediary. The introduction of smart contracts can enable communication without the need for a trusted intermediary. To provide security and decentralization in industrial communication processes, smart contract-based middleware is proposed. This proposal is evaluated for impacts against the stringent communication requirements required by industrial applications. Experimental results show that while this approach offers greater security and decentralization than traditional proposals, blockchain-based smart contracts cannot yet be applied to industrial systems due to blocking time.
The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) plays an indispensable role in Industry 4.0. People are committed to a universal, scalable, and secure IIoT system for use in a variety of industries. However, existing IIoT systems are not prone to provide stable services due to single points of failure and malicious attacks. In the era of big data, countless machines and equipment are generating data all the time, which can be used for scientific research, commodity production, and improving the efficiency of industrial development. Since the Internet of Things (IoT) connects all the smart machines together, ensuring data integrity is of great significance. How to ensure and detect the data integrity of the IoT is a topic of concern. This paper designs and implements a distributed blockchain data simulation system for data integrity assurance and detection in the context of IIoT applications. A method for assuring and detecting the integrity of IoT data is presented. A complete simulation system of IoT data based on blockchain is designed and implemented. The time consumed in the block mining process under different parameters is measured, and the correlation between the block mining time and different parameters is found, and the law of the influence of different parameters on the block mining time is obtained.
In recent years, novel collaborative production paradigms, such as (re-)distributed manufacturing and social manufacturing, have attracted intensive attention due to their potential of further changing the existing manufacturing modes and industrial structures. Blockchain, as a new distributed computing architecture, is expected to be successfully used in manufacturing, and help solve issues related to interoperability and collaboration, security and supervision, marketization and protocol, democratic organization and global value chain governance, and so on. In this paper, a blockchain-based framework for collaborative production is proposed, aiming at providing novel ideas for the design, implementation and optimization of collaborative production, and also inspiring the upgrading and transformation of manufacturing industries.
Predictive Maintenance in the era of Internet-of-Things is envisioned to be an important functionality of consumer electronics along with many other application areas. Challenges for Predictive Maintenance within Internet-of-Things ecosystem include heterogeneity, scalability, identification, constrained resources, mobility, security, and privacy. In this paper, we propose a reference model for Predictive Maintenance of commercial appliances, the digital twins of which interact socially via Distributed Ledger Technologies.
Ali Vatankhah Barenji, Zhi Li, W.M. Wang, George Q. Huang · 5 authors
With product customisation and emerging business opportunities, small and medium manufacturing enterprises (SMEs) must find ways to collaborate and share competency in a trustable manner to survive a turbulent market. Therefore, service industry turns to the manufacturing industry and SMEs migrate to cloud manufacturing (CM) and ubiquitous manufacturing. However, existing platforms use centralised networking, which suffers from security, scalability and big-data problems. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based platform as a trustable network to eradicate third-party problems, which can improve the scalability, security and big-data problems for SMEs. Our proposed platform is developed based on a consortium blockchain which provides a peer-to-peer communication network between the end user and the service provider. We improve existing consensus mechanism and communication protocol based on a cyber-physical system (CPS), via an autonomous agent. Firstly, we provide a review of cloud manufacturing, ubiquitous manufacturing and blockchain-based manufacturing approaches by highlighting the main problems. Then, the proposed platform, blockchain ubiquitous manufacturing (BCUM), is explained, based on its architecture, consensus algorithm and CPS, with the help of autonomous agent communication. The proposed platform has been developed for 3D printing companies which are geographically distributed and tested based on network performance and three practical scenarios.
Stefan Kurpjuweit, Christoph G. Schmidt, Maximilian Klöckner, Stephan M. Wagner
Additive manufacturing (AM) appears to be a particularly attractive use case for blockchain. This research combines inductive in‐depth interviews with the Delphi method to explore what potentials blockchain technology in AM creates, which adoption barriers firms need to overcome, and how supply chains will be affected by the integration of these two potentially disruptive technologies. The results suggest opportunities that are related to intellectual property (IP) rights management, the monitoring of printed parts throughout their lifecycle, process improvements, and data security. The most important barriers for blockchain adoption in AM are an absence of blockchain‐skilled specialists on the labor market, missing governance mechanisms, and a lack of firm‐internal technical expertise. By addressing important limitations of AM, blockchain is expected to improve the competitiveness of AM in parts’ production, catalyzing the trend toward more decentralized manufacturing resulting in more agile, resilient, and flexible supply chains and reduced logistics costs. Beyond that, blockchain‐based AM platforms are expected to enhance supply chain visibility, drive supply chain digitalization, support supply chain finance, and contribute to the emergence of shared factory systems.
Digital Transformation in Industry
Sustainable Supply Chain Management
Additive Manufacturing and 3D Printing Technologies
Gabriel Hogan, Sigma Dolins, Izzet F. Senturk, Ioannis Fyrogenis · 8 authors
In this paper two contemporary technological novelties are combined to introduce the concept of a blockchain-based MaaS, with the aim of pinpointing where and how business value can be created through data-based services of such a system. Towards this purpose, an integrated version of the Business Model Canvas is deployed, combining the advantages of the Lean Canvas and the Ethics Canvas. The overview of data flows among the versatile system stakeholders are outlined to highlight the potential benefits for diverse industries through sharing and collaboration.
The extreme automation of our factories is necessary in order to face the Fourth Industrial Revolution. This new industrial paradigm will force our industries to manufacture much shorter and customized series at increasingly competitive prices, even tackling the manufacture of thousands of different configurations of a single base product. In order to achieve this, our production processes must have a flexibility in their configuration that has never been imagined before. This flexibility and ability to adapt automatically to demand are the essence of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and are part of the Western strategy to recover an industrial sector increasingly threatened by the Eastern production of large series at really competitive prices. Based on our participation in more than a dozen proofs of concept in the automotive, aeronautics, agri-food, or energy sectors, we describe the scenarios in which blockchain technology brings the greatest benefits to Industry 4.0. After finishing different experimentations, we carried out an in-depth analysis of the true added value of blockchain in the industry and contrasted our conclusions through interviews with more than 20 people in charge of innovation from different industries. As a result, we have obtained the principal four values of blockchain technology applied to Industry 4.0.
The airworthiness of aviation equipment is very important for ensuring the safety of civil aviation operations. This paper discusses and analyzes the status quo of airworthiness management and traceability of domestic aircraft equipment, and points out the problems still to be solved. Through the research on the status quo of IoT technology and blockchain technology in the civil aviation field in Europe and the United States, the Internet of Things technology has been relatively mature, but the application research of blockchain technology in the management of aircraft equipment is still in its infancy. Only the concept stage. This paper mainly studies how to build a full supply chain traceability model for the airworthiness of aircraft equipment based on blockchain technology combined with Internet of Things technology.
With the recent advancements in blockchain technology, it has become obvious that this technology is not just for crypto-currencies but instead can be used as a decentralized tool for better accountability. Blockchain has the capacity to transform the industries disruptively as it presents new features like smart contracts, tokenization of content, eliminating counterfeit products, supply chain improvement, digital twins, and end-to-end security. This paper presents a blockchain-based model for distributed and collaborative digital twin environments which is becoming indispensable in new “Any 4.0” era. The proposed model includes a public or private authority in the digital twin ecosystem providing non-repudiation of blockchain transactions, holistic security and privacy preservation. The proposed technique is based on the “X-by-design” and “X-as-a-service” principles which can be discussed as a novel model for better security, accountability and integrity in decentralized mechanisms. In order to elucidate, two case studies are described where the digital twin operations, stakeholders' activities and regarding transactions are stored on a blockchain.
Abstract Although the logistics management has been improving, the information management is still stagnant. The renewal mechanism of logistics information is the basic requirement of logistics system, but it is more important to solve the trust problem of logistics information. It is good for improving the logistics management to design a verifiable information management mechanism which can help relevant participants establish trust relationships. This paper analyzes the development status of block chain technology, then a decentralized and self-verifiable system management program model is designed. Finally, the application is implemented based on the intelligent contract design of Ethereum block chain.
As supply chain has become extremely complicated, traditional supply chain management schemes reveal limitations in keeping track of resources for efficient risk management. Recently, blockchain-based solutions for supply chain have shown possibility to overcome those limits. However, numerous practical problems in this research domain are not fully explored up to date. Thus, we delve into one of the most significant problems among them: verification of business logic in transactions. In this paper, we propose a novel distributed ledger system for supply chain, enabled by anomaly detection framework that verifies semantic correctness of transactions based on business context data. Our blockchain data model is tailored to accurately represent events occurred in supply chain based on real-world business standards. In order to facilitate more efficient tracking of provenance, we leverage graph data model to represent supply chain network. On top of the data model, we present smart contract-based anomaly detection framework that verifies whether a transaction is anomalous. Generic rule-based and graph-based detection methods are devised. The feasibility of our proposed model is shown by the system implemented using Hyperledger Sawtooth. We show how our anomaly detection layer can be plugged into the system: how it interacts with other system components, and how overall system flow works with this new function. We evaluate our system with scenario-based simulations. For a number of use cases we synthesized, the correctness and effectiveness of our system are demonstrated.
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.
With the development of the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), the existing IIoT platform has gradually formed a large-scale, heterogeneous distributed environment. How to ensure information security and achieve efficient product traceability is an urgent problem to be solved in the development of the steel IoT platform. In view of the low transparency of information traceability of current steel products and the defects of information islands, in this article the blockchain-based steel IoT quality traceability system is developed and adopted the alliance chain mode and the Hyperledger blockchain platform. Experimental tests prove that production companies, logistics, and consumers can participate in the information certification of steel products via the system. Consumers can understand the real product manufacturing process, effectively avoiding the incomplete information and low transparency in the traditional information traceability process, and effectively trace the quality of steel products. The system provides an effective scheme for promoting the transformation and upgrading of the steel industry.
Industrial Internet of things (IIoT) is referred exclusively to smart and cheap sensor based devices lying on top of machines or machine parts, to collect and process massive raw data and therefore to make intelligent decisions autonomously, without human intervention, according to the Industry 4.0 requirements. However, there are still challenges to address, such as the massive amount of data generated in high speeds and the fast processing requirements and also challenges in the security domain, such as data integrity and ID authentication. Currently decentralized IoT/Fog network architectures would come in handy, in order to release data processing “burden” from isolated Cloud servers. On the other hand, Blockchain has emerged as a key technology for handling manufacturing, raw or processed data, in safety and security environment, while distributing it to the physical world, consisting of heterogeneous entities, such as manufacturers, retailers, suppliers, logistics agents or simple clients, thus reinforcing the IT and automation potentials of product supply chain. In this paper we propose an abstraction layer architecture that solves all that issues. On the one hand, there is a decentralized IOT/Fog and cloud framework for real time machine condition monitoring (MCM) and fault prediction, where computational demanding tasks are distributed across fog nodes and decision fusion rules are set and controlled by the Cloud. On the other hand, a peer to peer Blockchain ledger is also proposed for integrating the IOT/Fog, MCM network architecture along with other entities of the physical world, making supply chain network more efficient and intelligent. The proposed generic architecture can be applied to other application areas as well.