Abstract
The Internet of Things provides manufacturing with rich data for increased automation. Beyond company-internal data exploitation, the sharing of product and manufacturing process data along and across supply chains enables more efficient production flows and product lifecycle management. Even more, data-based automation facilitates short-lived ad hoc collaborations, realizing highly dynamic business relationships for sustainable exploitation of production resources and capacities. However, the sharing and use of business data across manufacturers and with end customers add requirements on data accountability, verifiability, and reliability and needs to consider security and privacy demands. While research has already identified blockchain technology as a key technology to address these challenges, current solutions mainly evolve around logistics or focus on established business relationships instead of automated but highly dynamic collaborations that cannot draw upon long-term trust relationships. We identify three open research areas on the road to such a truly accountable and dependable manufacturing enabled by blockchain technology: blockchain-inherent challenges, scenario-driven challenges, and socio-economic challenges. Especially tackling the scenario-driven challenges, we discuss requirements and options for realizing a blockchain-based trustworthy information store and outline its use for automation to achieve a reliable sharing of product information, efficient and dependable collaboration, and dynamic distributed markets without requiring established long-term trust.
Highlights
Manufacturing is expected to significantly benefit from recent advances regarding the Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS)
Several complementary research directions dedicated to new concepts such as the Industrial IoT (IIoT) or the Internet of Production (IoP) [6] aim to incorporate corresponding advances into industrial processes, especially manufacturing
Using blockchain technology, we propose the idea of a trustworthy information store (TrustedStore) to realize a reliable and automated production landscape
Summary
Manufacturing is expected to significantly benefit from recent advances regarding the Internet of Things (IoT) and Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). To capture the benefits of (global) data sharing, we focus on the research pillars P1–P3 that consider multiple stakeholders in automated collaborative processes Such industry-driven multi-stakeholder settings mandate special needs that traditional solutions in the (I)IoT cannot satisfy. We primarily discuss how to establish trust in the authenticity and correctness of data on the blockchain with the goal of facilitating further process automation This way, a solid foundation for future inter-organizational data sharing within the IIoT/IoP can be established that eventually enables stakeholders to leverage the data reliability promised by blockchain technology in a sustainable production landscape. We present the results of our work in Section 4: We develop a framework for classifying research challenges that considers three layers (blockchain-inherent, scenariodriven, and socio-economic challenges), including different pillars for realizing increasingly open and inter-organizational data exchanges and automated processes based on scenariodriven research challenges along with our proposed concept of a TrustedStore.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
