Agreements between Enterprises digitized by Smart Contracts in the Domain of Industry 4.0

TL;DR

This paper explores how blockchain and smart contracts facilitate secure, reliable, and automated agreements between enterprises in Industry 4.0, enhancing trust and reducing failures in digitalized cross-company workflows.

Contribution

It demonstrates the application of blockchain and smart contracts for automating and securing enterprise agreements in Industry 4.0, with a focus on a machine maintenance use case.

Findings

Significant reduction in failures using smart contracts and blockchain.

Enhanced trust and automation in cross-company workflows.

Feasibility of smart contracts for automating contractual workflows.

Abstract

The digital transformation of companies is expected to increase the digital interconnection between different companies to develop optimized, customized, hybrid business models. These cross-company business models require secure, reliable, and traceable logging and monitoring of contractually agreed information sharing between machine tools, operators, and service providers. This paper discusses how the major requirements for building hybrid business models can be tackled by the blockchain for building a chain of trust and smart contracts for digitized contracts. A machine maintenance use case is used to discuss the readiness of smart contracts for the automation of workflows defined in contracts. Furthermore, it is shown that the number of failures is significantly improved by using these contracts and a blockchain.