Decentralized Machine Autonomy for Manufacturing Servitization

Abstract

Blockchain ecosystems are rapidly maturing and meeting the needs of business environments (e.g., industry, manufacturing, and robotics). The decentralized approaches in industries enable novel business concepts, such as machine autonomy and servitization of manufacturing environments. Introducing the distributed ledger technology principles into the machine sharing and servitization economy faces several challenges, and the integration opens new interesting research questions. Our research focuses on data and event models and secure upgradeable smart contract platforms for machine servitization. Our research indicates that with the proposed approaches, we can efficiently separate on- and off-chain data and assure scalability of the DApp without compromising the trust. We demonstrate that the secure upgradeable smart contract platform, which was adapted for machine servitization, supports the business workflow and, at the same time, assures common identification and authorization of all the participants in the system, including people, devices, and legal entities. We present a hybrid decentralized application (DApp) for the servitization of 3D printing. The solution can be used for or easily adapted to other manufacturing domains. It comprises a modular, upgradeable smart contract platform and off-chain machine, customer and web management, and monitoring interfaces. We pay special attention to the data and event models during the design, which are fundamental for the hybrid data storage and DApp architecture and the responsiveness of off-chain interfaces. The smart contract platform uses a proxy contract to control the access of smart contracts and role-based access control in function calls for blockchain users. We deploy and evaluate the DApp in a consortium blockchain network for performance and privacy. All the actors in the solution, including the machines, are identified by their blockchain accounts and are compeers. Our solution thus facilitates integration with the traditional information-communication systems in terms of the hybrid architectures and security standards for smart contract design comparable to those in traditional software engineering.

A Primer on the Factories of the Future

“…Autonomy is the highest level of system control by non-human actors within the industrial and manufacturing processes. It is the expected future state of the Factory of the Future , a state where very limited human intervention would be required for the full functioning of a factory [ 63 , 64 , 65 , 66 ]. Artificial intelligence (AI), which provides and represents computational procedures for automated sensing, reasoning, learning, and decision making, would be a critical part of autonomy in manufacturing [ 67 ].…”

Scalability Solutions in Blockchain-Supported Manufacturing: A Survey

“…Block data [66], [67] Consensus mechanism [68], [69], [70], [71], [72], [73], [74], [75], [67], [76] Blockchain structure [77], [78], [79], [80], [81], [53], [82] Sharding [83], [84], [85] Layer 2…”

“…Payment channels [86], [87] Sidechains [41], [88] Cross-chain [89], [90], [91], [92], [93], [94], [69], [70] Off-chain [71], [95], [96], [97], [98], [99]…”

“…A consortium PoA consensus mechanism is proposed in the case of the smart contract platform for the machine servitization blockchain network [71]. The proposed system of three-dimensional (3D) printing servitization is not public and it is a system provided by a known platform provider to known machine providers.…”

“…A similar way of recording generated data is presented in the case of 3D printing as a service in a decentralized manufacturing concept where important data about the service is written on the blockchain network, and additional digital content, such as stereolithography (STL) files, is stored offchain [71]. The off-chain cloud storage is an add-on integrated into the on-chain logic.…”