Towards an Autonomous Industry 4.0 Warehouse: A UAV and Blockchain-Based System for Inventory and Traceability Applications in Big Data-Driven Supply Chain Management

Abstract

Industry 4.0 has paved the way for a world where smart factories will automate and upgrade many processes through the use of some of the latest emerging technologies. One of such technologies is Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), which have evolved a great deal in the last years in terms of technology (e.g., control units, sensors, UAV frames) and have significantly reduced their cost. UAVs can help industry in automatable and tedious tasks, like the ones performed on a regular basis for determining the inventory and for preserving item traceability. In such tasks, especially when it comes from untrusted third parties, it is essential to determine whether the collected information is valid or true. Likewise, ensuring data trustworthiness is a key issue in order to leverage Big Data analytics to supply chain efficiency and effectiveness. In such a case, blockchain, another Industry 4.0 technology that has become very popular in other fields like finance, has the potential to provide a higher level of transparency, security, trust and efficiency in the supply chain and enable the use of smart contracts. Thus, in this paper, we present the design and evaluation of a UAV-based system aimed at automating inventory tasks and keeping the traceability of industrial items attached to Radio-Frequency IDentification (RFID) tags. To confront current shortcomings, such a system is developed under a versatile, modular and scalable architecture aimed to reinforce cyber security and decentralization while fostering external audits and big data analytics. Therefore, the system uses a blockchain and a distributed ledger to store certain inventory data collected by UAVs, validate them, ensure their trustworthiness and make them available to the interested parties. In order to show the performance of the proposed system, different tests were performed in a real industrial warehouse, concluding that the system is able to obtain the inventory data really fast in comparison to traditional manual tasks, while being also able to estimate the position of the items when hovering over them thanks to their tag’s signal strength. In addition, the performance of the proposed blockchain-based architecture was evaluated in different scenarios.

Towards Next Generation Teaching, Learning, and Context-Aware Applications for Higher Education: A Review on Blockchain, IoT, Fog and Edge Computing Enabled Smart Campuses and Universities

“…Nowadays, there are many blockchain platforms, like Ethereum [49], Hyperledger Fabric [50], or the popular Bitcoin [51], that can be used in multiple practical applications [52][53][54][55]. However, it is important to emphasize that blockchain is not the best technology for every application that needs to perform trustworthy data exchanges.…”

A Survey of Recent Extended Variants of the Traveling Salesman and Vehicle Routing Problems for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

“…Drones can also be useful for identifying diseased plants early and to establish an inventory of crops or to assess the soil salinity of arable land [7]. For industrial warehouses, UAVs are also useful for conveniently establishing inventories through RFID [8].…”

A Digital Twin for Automated Root-Cause Search of Production Alarms Based on KPIs Aggregated from IoT

“…Additionally, the issue of validity of the indicators that are aggregated from IoT is also an issue that has not been raised herein, as the data have been considered to be valid. In addition to this, architectures that are based on complexity handling [45] and algorithms, such as Blockchain [46], can guarantee this goal, while, as indicated by corresponding results in literature [47], the introduction of a manipulation strategy, such as KPI-ML, will boost the performance of any algorithm, including the current. In other pieces of literature [48], the Multiple Alarms Matrix is utilized and hierarchical clustering is applied.…”