Multi-UAV Employed Secure Product Management and Surveillance System in Industry 4.0 using Blockchain

One of the significant challenges in Industry 4.0 is delivering secure data management during pre- and post-production. Furthermore, surveillance in restricted areas is also crucial since individuals can forfeit or seize the products in various circumstances. Therefore, using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can create new opportunities to improve surveillance and product management in Industry 4.0. This paper presents a multi-UAV-employed secure data management and surveillance system to overcome the above-mentioned challenges in Industry 4.0. Firstly, an inventory data management UAV-based automated product counting technique is developed using the radio frequency identification technique to avoid human involvement in production storage. Moreover, a surveillance UAV-based person detection technique using a deep learning (DL) model is proposed to detect humans in restricted areas. Additionally, blockchain-based secure product tracking techniques using a multi-access edge computing (MEC) server are utilized to provide integrity in the overall Industry 4.0 environment. The experimental result shows that the proposed UAV-based secure product management is efficacious for using the MEC server in the network in terms of latency analysis. Moreover, the surveillance UAV can successfully detect the person using the You Only Look Once (YOLOv8-small) DL model with higher accuracy.