ABSTRACT
Blockchain is distributed digital ledger technology that facilitates reliable and transparent transactions among the participants of a system. Blockchain has been applied to various manufacturing applications and helps to create an automatic, decentralised smart manufacturing system with a high level of efficiency and productivity. This paper presents a comprehensive survey on blockchain in Industry 4.0 – applications, architectures, techniques, and research challenges. We propose a blockchain reference architecture for smart manufacturing, which guides our discussions on applying the blockchain technology to various applications of the smart factory and smart supply chain.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.