Trustworthy data-driven networked production for customer-centric plants
| Published date | 04 December 2017 |
| Date | 04 December 2017 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/IMDS-10-2016-0419 |
| Pages | 2305-2324 |
| Author | Davy Preuveneers,Wouter Joosen,Elisabeth Ilie-Zudor |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Information systems,Data management systems,Knowledge management,Knowledge sharing,Management science & operations,Supply chain management,Supply chain information systems,Logistics,Quality management/systems |
Trustworthy data-driven
networked production for
customer-centric plants
Davy Preuveneers and Wouter Joosen
imec-DistriNet KU Leuven Leuven, Belgium, and
Elisabeth Ilie-Zudor
MTA SZTAKI,
Hungarian Academy of Sciences Institute for Computer Science and Control,
Budapest, Hungary
Abstract
Purpose –Industry 4.0 envisions a future of networked production where interconnected machines and
business processes running in the cloud will communicate with one another to optimize production
and enable more efficient and sustainable individualized/mass manufacturing. However, the openness and
process transparency of networked production in hyperconnected manufacturing enterprises pose severe
cyber-security threats and information security challenges that need to be dealt with. The paper aims to
discuss these issues.
Design/methodology/approach –This paper presents a distributed trust model and middleware for
collaborative and decentralized access control to guarantee data transparency, integrity, authenticity and
authorization of dataflow-oriented Industry 4.0 processes.
Findings –The results of a performance study indicate that private blockchains are capable of securing
IoT-enabled dataflow-oriented networked production processes across the trust boundaries of the Industry
4.0 manufacturing enterprise.
Originality/value –This paper contributes a decentralized identity and relationship management for users,
sensors, actuators, gateways and cloud services to support processes that cross the trust boundaries of the
manufacturing enterprise, while offering protection against malicious adversaries gaining unauthorized
access to systems, services and information.
Keywords Internet, Information flow, Network organization, Blockchains, Inter-organizational trust,
Networked production
Paper type Research paper
1. Introduction
The networked production of Industry 4.0 (Lee et al., 2015) and the Factory of the
Future (FoF) (Karnouskos et al., 2012) will facilitate the control and optimization of
individualized manufacturing where a customer’s personal preferences can be swiftly
fulfilled without any delay on the mass production process. However, the increased
transparency of networked production poses severe cyber-security threats. The
proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) devices and CPS in networked production
increases the attack surface for a malicious user to sabotage critical infrastructure, gain
unauthorized access to sensitive data about customers or intervene in collaborative
production processes. These threats jeopardize the widespread adoption of Industry 4.0
processes, especially those that operate across the organizational trust boundaries of the
manufacturing enterprise.
This paper presents a solution for secure and trustworthy data management based on
private blockchains with capabilities for authenticating and authorizing users, things and Industrial Management & Data
Systems
Vol. 117 No. 10, 2017
pp. 2305-2324
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0263-5577
DOI 10.1108/IMDS-10-2016-0419
Received 4 October 2016
Revised 10 February 2017
Accepted 12 April 2017
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0263-5577.htm
This research is partially funded by the Research Fund KU Leuven and by the European Commission
through the H2020 project EXCELL (http://excell-project.eu/) under Grant No. 691829.
2305
Trustworthy
data-driven
networked
production
services in IoT-enabled decentralized networked production environments, with the
following key contributions:
(1) decentralized identity and relationship management for users, sensors, actuators,
gateways and cloud services to support processes that cross the trust boundaries of
the manufacturing enterprise (see Figure 1);
(2) a distributed trust model based on blockchains operating across the IoT and the
cloud to guarantee data transparency, integrity, authenticity and authorization of
dataflow-oriented Industry 4.0 processes; and
(3) auditing support for data exchange between nodes in the production network as
well as workflow compliance of these decentralized manufacturing and business
processes.
The motivation for choosing blockchains (Swan, 2015) is the inherent distributed mode of
operation without a centralized trust authority as well as the increased transparency and
accurate tracking benefits.
After discussing related work in Section 2 and a motivating use case on networked
production in Section 3, we present in Section 4 our blockchain-based framework for
secure and trustworthy data management for IoT-enabled netw orked producti on with
decentralized identity and relationship management, access control and auditing support.
We evaluate our implementation and discuss performance aspects in Section 5, and
conclude in Section 6 summarizing our main insights and identifying interesting topics for
further research.
2. Background and related work
This section reviews ongoing research on key concepts of Industry 4.0, cyber-security and
blockchain technology for highly resilient decentralized trustworthy services.
2.1 The industrial internet of things (IIoT) and industry 4.0
The IIoT and Industry 4.0 envision improved operational efficiency in connected
ecosystems of collaborating humans, machines and services (Schuh et al., 2014) by
automating decisions and taking actions in real time. Hermann et al. (2016) have carried out
Hyperconnected
manufacturing
enterprise X
Hyperconnected
manufacturing
enterprise Y
Malicious user
Industrial Internet of Things
Trust
Trust
Tru s t
Monitoring
Analytics
Workflows
Business intelligence services in the cloud
Figure 1.
Networked production
across organizational
trust boundaries
2306
IMDS
117,10
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