Media Informatics master thesis at RWTH Aachen University collaborated with Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology FIT. Thesis title is "A Blockchain-Based Concept and Implementation for Machine Identity and Machine-to-Machine Communication".
- Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Prinz (RWTH Aachen University, Germany)
- Prof. Dr. Thomas Rose (RWTH Aachen University, Germany)
Over the last two decades, the rapid advances in digitalization methods put us on the fourth industrial era's cusp. It is an era of connectivity and interactivity between various industrial processes that involve various humans, artificial agents, systems, machines, and services. These parties need a new trusted environment to exchange and share information and data without relying on third parties. Blockchain technologies with features like security, immutability, and decentralization can provide such a trusted environment.
This thesis investigates the applicability of blockchain in the manufacturing industry. The focus is to utilize the blockchain with its characteristics to build a machine to machine (M2M) communication and digital twin solutions. The thesis proposes a generic conceptual design for a distributed system that uses smart contracts to construct digital twins for machines and products, give a self-sovereign digital identity for twins, and execute manufacturing processes over the blockchain. Moreover, a functional prototype of the proposed solution is implemented for a factory simulation case study consisting of four machines and two manufacturing processes. The prototype includes a distributed web application (DApp) that allows different actors to interact with the machines, products, and processes through the blockchain. It provides dashboards to monitor and control manufacturing processes that run autonomously by the smart contracts. Developing a prototype allows evaluating the design and the modeling to find loopholes and limitations. This work demonstrates the value of executing the industrial processes as a smart contract code residing on a decentralized network.
Prototype implementation source code can be found in this repository.
This video demonstrates how the prototype is working in an exemplary use case.
Based on LaTeX template for TUM theses with minor modifications.