Applying Blockchain in Industry 4.0 Applications

By adopting the vision of Industry 4.0, many industrial sectors are eyeing the potential for advancing their systems to achieve higher productivity, cost-effectiveness, reliability, quality, and flexibility. One important sector that can greatly benefit from adopting Industry 4.0 principles and technologies is the manufacturing industry. This will help create the smart manufacturing era where advanced technologies and systems in Industry 4.0 will enhance the different processes within the manufacturing value chain and increase efficiency and profitability. However, Industry 4.0 requires effective integration of many technologies and systems and seamless operations across all components. This creates many challenges when creating applications for smart manufacturing including security, trust, traceability, reliability, and agreement automation within the manufacturing value chain. Several of these challenges can be addressed using blockchain. This paper discusses how blockchain can support smart manufacturing applications in manufacturing. In addition, the paper proposes a middleware approach for utilizing blockchain services and capabilities to enable more secure, trustable, traceable, reliable, and autonomous smart manufacturing applications. This approach will offer many advantages to secure and establish good trust among involved parties in the manufacturing value chain. In addition, this will enable a verity of new applications to realize the promising benefits of Industry 4.0 for smart manufacturing.