Abstract
While companies struggle to implement Smart Factory initiatives, the emergence of decentralized Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) promises to support Smart Factories. However, little is known about the extent to which DLT can support Smart Factory initiatives. Thus, this paper examines whether DLT is a useful addition to the Smart Factory concept in the context of Industry 4.0. The focus of the research lies on practical challenges that manufacturing companies are confronted with when creating Smart Factories and integrating them into their value chain. These challenges were worked out with the help of a literature review and interviews, which were conducted with employees of one of the most renowned industrial automation and digitization companies (undisclosed for confidentiality). Based on this, two DLT concepts were developed and discussed with the experts regarding their respective opportunities, risks, and feasibility. The DLT-based Audit Trail is intended to solve the challenge of creating a detailed, consistent and traceable overview of production processes, while the Crypto-based Agent Logic solves the challenge of setting priorities for orders in a fully automated production process. The results show that DLT integration in the context of the Smart Factory concept is to be regarded as useful and should be driven forward by further research.
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Notes
- 1.
The term Industry 4.0 was coined by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), which supports medium-sized companies in various funding programs to actually dare the change to Industry 4.0, the digitization of production (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung 2017).
- 2.
“I2” stands for the second expert interview, see Table 2 in methodology for more details.
- 3.
According to Rauchs et al. (2018, p. 24), a DLT system can be defined as “[…] a system of electronic records that enables a network of independent participants to establish a consensus around the authoritative ordering of cryptographically-validated (‘signed’) transactions. These records are made persistent by replicating the data across multiple nodes, and tamper-evident by linking them by cryptographic hashes. The shared result of the reconciliation/consensus process - the ‘ledger’ - serves as the authoritative version for these records”.
- 4.
See https://lightning.network for further information.
- 5.
See https://www.elaad.nl for further information.
- 6.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-mrQdqVg2I for further information.
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Roeck, D., Schöneseiffen, F., Greger, M., Hofmann, E. (2020). Analyzing the Potential of DLT-based Applications in Smart Factories. In: Treiblmaier, H., Clohessy, T. (eds) Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology Use Cases. Progress in IS. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44337-5_12
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