Blockchain Enabled Maintenance Management Framework for Military Equipment

Abstract

Maintenance of military equipment plays a vital role in achieving higher war readiness. The vast number of military equipment and their deployment on distinct locations make their maintenance a challenging task. Decision-makers are always interested in knowing the latest status of equipment, develop effective maintenance strategies, and predict mission reliability as accurately as possible. To suffice this need, maintenance data of military equipment must be maintained with high granularity and accuracy, including maintenance information about every lowest maintainable unit of every military equipment. There is a profound need for a comprehensive maintenance management framework, which addresses several military-specific issues with equipment maintenance and stores the maintenance data in the utmost secure environment. In this article, we attempt to provide a novel blockchain enabled framework to make military maintenance management comprehensive and future ready. This article first provides a representation of the maintenance scenario of military equipment and later discusses the several choices made available within the blockchain technology, along with the architecture of the proposed blockchain. The proposed framework uses smart contracts to make monitoring and validation more uncompromising and with minimum human intervention. Some pragmatic analytics are presented in this article, along with the inherent blockchain advantages.