This paper proposed a blockchain manufacturing framework that involves the utilization of secondary validation and collaborative distribution concepts. Conventional and blockchain manufacturing simulators were developed to investigate the effects of blockchain technologies on manufacturing systems in terms of time and product quality. The simulation results illustrated that the products manufactured in the blockchain-based system are of better quality than the conventional system but does not necessarily reduce the manufacturing times due to the secondary validation and collaborative distribution processes, which are also responsible for ensuring manufacturing quality. The results also emphasized the importance of utilizing collaborative distribution models to improve workcell utilization within blockchain-based systems. By implementing the collaborative distribution logic within the blockchain, the manufacturing times will be lessened. This paper highlights the potential of utilizing blockchain technologies to enhance Cyber-Physical Systems in the manufacturing industry.
A product lifecycle can be understood as a chain of events experienced by a product. These events do not only include the actual production but also service offerings which accompany the product throughout its life. This leads to integrated product and service offerings and Industrial Product Service Systems (IPS2). Major challenges in this context are product tracking and tracing, the triggering of service and the delivery of service. A new technology that holds much promise in addressing these challenges is blockchain. In response, this study first introduces blockchain technology before it discusses major opportunities in the context of IPS2. For example, blockchain inherently creates a synchronized database of all transaction at each node while smart contracts allow for responsive action. However, there are also challenges. For example, large amounts of redundant data, irreversible contracts and, consequently, reduced competition. While blockchain holds much promise, more needs to be done to unlock its full potential in the context of IPS2.
Ashok K. Pundir, Jadhav Devpriya Jagannath, Mrinmoy Chakraborty, L. Ganpathy
Supply chain networks are global, multi-modal platforms that are expected to facilitate seamless exchange of physical goods, information across multiple industries and enterprises and stakeholders. Current supply chain information systems are limited in term of providing validated, real-time asset specific business relevant information during its lifecycle. Only one or few stakeholders have information access privilege causing both information asymmetry and inefficiencies in the $35T global supply chain market. Emerging technologies such as IoT and Blockchain democratize "trustworthy" data availability and empower stakeholders to make the right decision at the right time in the most cost-effective manner. Digital supply chain integration is progressively becoming a competitive differentiation of enterprises. Organizations leading to this approach of digital supply chain are rapidly improving their asset utilization and enabling new databased services. This paper presents the idea about relevance of complementary technologies like IoT and Blockchain technology for complete digitization of supply chain. The business case of pallet renting vendor is taken to showcase the use of technology integration to improve efficiency of its supply chain and asset management.
Rainer Schmidt, Michael Möhring, Barbara Keller, Alfréd Zimmermann
We investigate which potentials are created by using smart contracts for disintermediation in supply chains for additive manufacturing. Using a qualitative, critical realist research approach, we analyzed three case studies with companies active in additive manufactures. Based on interviews with experts from these companies, we could identify eight key requirements for disintermediation and associate four potentials of smart contracts-based disintermediation.
Abhinaw Sai Erri Pradeep, Tak Wing Yiu, Robert Amor
Building Information Modelling (BIM) involves the exchange of models and information between stakeholders and within collaborating teams. This information is prone to contractual, legal, security and system issues amongst others. The existing practices aim to address a digital concept such as BIM with solutions from the paper worldcontracts and other documents, which do not solve the problem completely. A recent advancement in database management -Blockchain Technology (BCT) aims to provide a new stream of solutions to industries across various sectors. BCT is a system of recording a database that stores information chronologically and distributes a copy of it over a network of computers that maintain its authenticity and security collectively. This paper first reviews the literature on the issues of information exchange in a BIM workflow and next explores the concept of BCT and its connection with BIM. The literature indicates that BCT shows high potential for solving challenges during the design phase of the project by clarifying liabilities, increasing the reliability of information and enhancing the security of information flow. Its ability to incorporate self-executing contracts enable many more applications around ownership and payments. Finally, the paper discusses a few of its challenges with scalability, user acceptance amongst others.
The blockchain is a distributed ledger managed by a peer to peer network that stores all transaction records. The distributed ledger technology offers new possibilities, promising to ensure that data is secure, decentralized and incomparable. In the Architecture, Engineering, Construction (AEC) industry, Building Information Modeling (BIM) has quickly become a standard platform where all parties work together on a single and shared model for collaboration. The issues of Supply Chain Management (SCM) within BIM can be identified in BIM maturity level, based on PAS1193 that developed through Common Data Environment (CDE). The research strategy is to make model and simulation of SCM using BIM and create CDE to become decentralized and integrate the blockchain technology. The smart contract system validates every material and configuration of components within the model from the design stage until the operation stage. Traceability and auditability through an immutable historic eventually be more visible and allow real-time tracking of a material to a construction site providing a history from the origin.
Nejc Rožman, Rok Vrabič, Marko Corn, Tomaž Požrl · 5 authors
This paper presents an approach to integrating Blockchain and IoT technologies into modern supply chains. We propose the concept of a new logistics platform that is built as a distributed network of nodes and offers an alternative approach dealing with the complexity of modern supply chains by breaking them into smaller, functionally independent parts. The modular structure of the platform allows users to add their own nodes or extend the functionality of the existing ones. Nodes are communicating with the use of IoT technology, which serves as a bridge between the virtual and real worlds, making this platform truly digital. Blockchain technology is not only used for writing down agreements and for making transactions, but also as a trustworthy public listing of services and information. It connects the nodes into a public and secure system that provides reliable services of a supply chain. In this work, we describe the individual nodes and their implementation and present preliminary results of experiments using a laboratory model of a logistic chain.
Ali Vatankhah Barenji, Hanyang Guo, Zonggui Tian, Zhi Li · 6 authors
Recently, there has been growing interest in the field of cloud manufacturing (CM) amongst researchers in the manufacturing community. Cloud manufacturing is a customer-driven manufacturing model that was inspired by cloud computing, and its major objective was to provide ubiquitous on-demand access to services. However, the current CM architecture suffers from problems that are associated with a centralized based industrial network framework and third part operation. In a nutshell, centralized networking has had issues with flexibility, efficiency, availability, and security. Therefore, this paper aims to tackle these problems by introducing an ongoing project to a decentralized network architecture for cloud manufacturing which is based on the blockchain technology. In essence, this research paper introduces the blockchain technology as a decentralized peer to peer network for multiple cloud manufacturing providers.
An inclusive project is classified and alienated into several tasks where as task management is one of the foremost components of project management, since the roles and tasks assigned by the manager of this component to each employee working on a project. In scrupulous there are several ways to track the status of work and this monitoring is also required to find the efficiency of an individual and at the time of the annual and mid- term appraisal and all these monitoring records can be used to give qualifications to associates and employees. In this work, the authors have proposed a system along with the solution based on the ERC20 token which is identified as blockchain platform based on Ethereum in which they can implement Project Task Management which is tamper proof and as well as can track the assigned task of an employee on real time basis.
In order to increase the level of global competitiveness and improve the performance of production system, a large number of manufacturing companies have implemented world class manufacturing (WCM) approach, which has developed based on the third industrial revolution and the need for mass production. The evolution in production equipment and communication technologies, and the demand of markets for personalized mass production, have forced manufacturing companies to transform their production systems and prepare for a revolution. This revolution, known as Industry 4.0 (I4.0), or the digital transformation, has been introduced as a new type of organization of manufacturing systems that is more flexible and agile, and is based on using large amounts of information and data in the decision-making process. One of the main characteristics of this concept is decentralization, which allows different subsystems to make decisions autonomously in order to have self-organization systems. There are some important differences between the principles of WCM and I4.0. World class manufacturing is mainly based on continuous improvement and cost reduction, without a global vision for profit optimization. Industry 4.0 is mainly based on using all accessible information and data of systems and making decentralized decisions, but it also involves a global vision and a systemic approach to global profit optimization. However, achieving these objectives takes a very long time, and the challenges are numerous. As with all projects, for a transformation project to succeed, it is very important to define the transition phase and the way to change and introduce these new principles. This paper presents part of our research project, in collaboration with the Fiat Powertrain Technologies company, concerning the transformation of their production system toward the factory of the future. We highlight the design principles of I4.0 and the potential of the WCM system for transformation and achieving development of the characteristics of I4.0. We focus on five of the principal technical pillars of WCM and the steps in their development, and present some modifications in adoption of the design principles of I4.0. An example of change in the professional maintenance pillar of WCM is also presented.
The persistent development towards decreasing batch sizes due to an ongoing product individualization, as well as increasingly dynamic market and competitive conditions lead to new changeability requirements in production environments. Since each of the individualized products might require different base materials or components and manufacturing resources, the paths of the products going through the factory as well as the required internal transport and material supply processes are going to differ for every product. Conventional planning and control systems, which rely on predefined processes and central decision-making, are not capable to deal with the arising system’s complexity along the dimensions of changing goods, layouts and throughput requirements. The concepts of “self-organization” in combination with “autonomous control” provide promising solutions to solve these new requirements by using among other things the potential of autonomous, decentralized and target-optimized decision-making. A major enabler for the development towards autonomous changeable intralogistics systems are intelligent logistical objects (e.g. smart products, bins and conveyor systems) which are able to communicate and interact with each other as well as with human workers. To investigate the potential of automation and human-robot collaboration for intralogistics, a research project for the development of a collaborative tugger train has been started at the ESB Logistics Learning Factory in line with various student projects in neighboring research areas. This collaborative tugger train system in combination with other manual (e.g. handcarts) and (semi-)automated conveyor systems (e.g. automated guided forklift) will be integrated into a dynamic, self-organized scenario with varying production batch sizes to develop a method for target-oriented self-organization and autonomous control of intralogistics systems. For a structured investigation of self-organized scenarios a generic intralogistics model as well as a criteria catalogue has been developed. The ESB Logistics Learning will serve as a practice-oriented research, validation and demonstration environment for these purposes.
Kentaroh Toyoda, Mojtaba Shakeri, Chi Xu, Allan N. Zhang
CIA (Confidentiality, Integrity and Availability) is getting more and more important in the cloud based manufacturing and IIoT (Industrial Internet-of-Things)/Indutry 4.0 domain. Recently, blockchain, a decentralized ledger technique, has attracted considerable attention to realize secure and robust data management systems for IIoT. Although several blockchain-based data management platforms for IIoT have been proposed, sensor data are stored outside of the blockchain, meaning that the data integrity and accessibility are not improved. In this paper, we take a different blockchain-based approach for sensor data management; any important sensor data are stored in the blockchain. For realizing this, a series of sensor data is compressed-then-stored in the blockchain by leveraging a fact that many sensor data often have a certain level of periodicity and stability. We have tested our idea against the real sensor data measured at our model factory, and evaluated several performance metrics such as compression ratio, compression/decompression time, process time required to store and retrieve sensor data from our Proof-of-Concept system with Ethereum and the expected blockchain size. From the results, it can be concluded that the proposed platform is viable for small factory cases but needs more technological advancement is required for large scale cases.
It has been ten years since Satoshi Nakamoto created bitcoin and introduced the concept of a blockchain. The original goal was to propose a solution to the double-spending problem using a peer-to-peer network. Now, Blockchain proves to have the capacity to deliver a new kind of trust to a wide range of services. Applications are being explored in healthcare (patient records), government (land registries) and electronics (Internet of Things). The supply chain is one of the fields that Blockchain is expected to be applied. The paper aims to combine blockchain with distributed storage and propose blockchain for the supply chain. Blockchain is not fit to record a lot of information. It requires both on-chain storage of the core ledger data and off-chain storage of data required by smart contracts for verification and documentation. The Inter Planetary File System (IPFS) is a concrete solution. IPFS is a peer-to-peer distributed file system that seeks to connect all computing devices with the same system of files. Participants can address large amounts of data with IPFS and place the immutable, permanent IPFS links into a blockchain transaction. This timestamps and secures their content, without having to put the data itself on the chain. By combining blockchain with distributed storage, the supply chain system is fit to the industry of the next generation. The characteristics of Industry 4.0 meets the blockchain-based system and the model can aid these changes.
By adopting the vision of Industry 4.0, many industrial sectors are eyeing the potential for advancing their systems to achieve higher productivity, cost-effectiveness, reliability, quality, and flexibility. One important sector that can greatly benefit from adopting Industry 4.0 principles and technologies is the manufacturing industry. This will help create the smart manufacturing era where advanced technologies and systems in Industry 4.0 will enhance the different processes within the manufacturing value chain and increase efficiency and profitability. However, Industry 4.0 requires effective integration of many technologies and systems and seamless operations across all components. This creates many challenges when creating applications for smart manufacturing including security, trust, traceability, reliability, and agreement automation within the manufacturing value chain. Several of these challenges can be addressed using blockchain. This paper discusses how blockchain can support smart manufacturing applications in manufacturing. In addition, the paper proposes a middleware approach for utilizing blockchain services and capabilities to enable more secure, trustable, traceable, reliable, and autonomous smart manufacturing applications. This approach will offer many advantages to secure and establish good trust among involved parties in the manufacturing value chain. In addition, this will enable a verity of new applications to realize the promising benefits of Industry 4.0 for smart manufacturing.
Industry 4.0 is a concept devised for improving the way modern factories operate through the use of some of the latest technologies, like the ones used for creating the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), robotics, or Big Data applications. One of such technologies is blockchain, which is able to add trust, security, and decentralization to different industrial fields. This article focuses on analyzing the benefits and challenges that arise when using blockchain and smart contracts to develop Industry 4.0 applications. In addition, this paper presents a thorough review of the most relevant blockchain-based applications for Industry 4.0 technologies. Thus, its aim is to provide a detailed guide for the future Industry 4.0 developers that allows for determining how the blockchain can enhance the next generation of cybersecure industrial applications.