A journey of WEB and Blockchain towards the Industry 4.0: An Overview

A Federated Blockchain Architecture for File Storage with Improved Latency and Reliability in IoT DApp Services

Blockchain technology can address data falsification, single point of failure (SPOF), and DDoS attacks on centralized services. By utilizing IoT devices as blockchain nodes, it is possible to solve the problem that it is difficult to ensure the integrity of data generated by using current IoT devices. However, as the amount of data generated by IoT devices increases, scalability issues are inevitable. As a result, large amounts of data are managed on external cloud storage or distributed file storage. However, this has the disadvantage of being outside the blockchain network. This makes it difficult to ensure reliability and causes high latency during data download and upload. To address these limitations, we propose a method for managing large amounts of data in the local storage node of a blockchain network with improved latency and reliability. Each blockchain network node stores data, which is synchronized and recovered based on reaching a consensus between smart contracts in a cluster network. The cluster network consists of a service leader node that serves as a gateway for services and a cluster node that stores service data in storage. The blockchain network stores synchronization and recovery metadata created in the cluster network. In addition, we showed that the performance of smart contract execution, network transmission, and metadata generation, which are elements of the proposed consensus process, is not significantly affected. In addition, we built a service leader node and a cluster node by implementing the proposed structure. We compared the performance (latency) of IoT devices when they utilized the proposed architecture and existing external distributed storage. Our results show improvements up to 4 and 10 times reduction in data upload (store) and download latency, respectively.

Fundamental pillars for industry 4.0 development: implementation framework and challenges in manufacturing environment

Purpose

At the present time, Industry 4.0 has proven its effectiveness and significance in automation and data exchange within industries across different sectors worldwide. In the current literature, there is still a lack of research on adopting Industry 4.0 in the manufacturing setting in developing economies. The main purpose of the present study is to explore the fundamental pillars and framework for ease of adoption of Industry 4.0 in manufacturing environments, along with highlighting the benefits and challenges.

Design/methodology/approach

In this study, a systematic literature review has been conducted through protocol, search, appraisal, synthesis, analysis, report (PSALSAR) model. In the literature, the articles are included within time span of 2008–2022, consisting keywords like Industry 4.0, blockchain, machine learning, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, 3D printing, big data analytics, etc. Based on available literature, conceptual implementation framework of Industry 4.0 is proposed.

Findings

This study explored the key ingredients that play an essential role to bridge the gap and construct a strong relationship among physical and cyber world. The results reveals that the emerging technologies such as IoT, blockchain, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, 3D printing, big-data analytics, cloud-computing join hands to accomplish success in Industry 4.0 by reducing human interference for effective and efficient systems. In addition, the study also explored the possible benefits of emerging technologies with challenges faced by manufacturing setting during adaptation of Industry 4.0.

Originality/value

As per the authors' best knowledge, no research articles are found in literature which explore various emerging technologies in Industry 4.0 with its implementation framework in the manufacturing setting in developing economies. The main focus of the present study is to discover the literature review in defined area and find the research gap among current scenario and future trend for execution of Industry 4.0 in manufacturing environment.