Analysis of Distributed Ledger Technologies for Industrial Manufacturing

TL;DR

This paper explores how Distributed Ledger Technologies can be integrated into industrial manufacturing to enable flexible, decentralized, and efficient manufacturing-as-a-service models, focusing on communication and computation efficiency in IoT networks.

Contribution

It proposes a general framework for adapting DLT in manufacturing and evaluates selected DLTs for shared manufacturing in resource-constrained IoT environments.

Findings

DLT can support decentralized trust in manufacturing.

Communication efficiency varies among different DLTs in IoT networks.

The framework facilitates integration of DLT into industrial processes.

Abstract

In recent years, industrial manufacturing has undergone massive technological changes that embrace digitalization and automation towards the vision of intelligent manufacturing plants. With the aim of maximizing efficiency and profitability in production, an important goal is to enable flexible manufacturing, both, for the customer (desiring more individualized products) and for the manufacturer (to adjust to market demands). Manufacturing-as-a-service can support this through manufacturing plants that are used by different tenants who utilize the machines in the plant, which are offered by different providers. To enable such pay-per-use business models, Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) is a viable option to establish decentralized trust and traceability. Thus, in this paper, we study potential DLT technologies for an efficient and intelligent integration of DLT-based solutions in manufacturing environments. We propose a general framework to adapt DLT in manufacturing, then we introduce the use case of shared manufacturing, which we utilize to study the communication and computation efficiency of selected DLTs in resource-constrained wireless IoT networks.