With product customization an emerging business opportunity, organizations must find ways to collaborate and enable sharing of information in an inherently trustless network. In this paper, we propose - "FabRec": a decentralized approach to handle manufacturing information generated by various organizations using blockchain technology. We propose a system in which a decentralized network of manufacturing machines and computing nodes can enable automated transparency of an organization's capability, third party verification of such capability through a trail of past historic events and automated mechanisms to drive paperless contracts between participants using 'smart contracts'. Our system decentralizes critical information about the manufacturer and makes it available on a peer-to-peer network composed of fiduciary nodes to ensure transparency and data provenance through a verifiable audit trail. We present a testbed platform through a combination of manufacturing machines, system-on-chip platforms and computing nodes to demonstrate mechanisms through which a consortium of disparate organizations can communicate through a decentralized network. Our prototype testbed demonstrates the value of computer code residing on a decentralized network for verification of information on the blockchain and ways in which actions can be autonomously initiated in the physical world. This paper intends to expose system elements in preparation for much larger field tests through the working prototype and discusses the future potential of blockchain for manufacturing IT.
In a Cybermanufacturing (CM) environment, the notion of networked organizations and machines creates an opportunity for product designs to be rapidly generated and then manufactured with limited human intervention through reuse of computer generated code or through automatic compilers that translate design data to machine instructions. However, ensuring trustworthiness among system elements in a Cybermanufacturing scenario can be challenging, particularly when there are multiple parties involved in the design, fabrication, production and verification of product assemblies. Traditionally this trust has been established between clients and manufacturers through extensive contract negotiation, acknowledgement of past historic performance, updated certifications and audits to ensure compliance. This 'trust tax' or rather the costs associated with ensuring trust among all parties in a supply chain of a product assembly is embedded into the final sales price charged to the customer [1]. In Cybermanufacturing, it is envisioned that we will have rapid commissioning and decommissioning of system elements, which means significant time and cost will need to be invested into securing trust in a networked environment spanning multiple business organizations. Traditional practices in establishing and evaluating trust will challenge the economic feasibility of cybermanufacturing platforms.
A partial solution to address this problem of trust determination is through the use of ‘pull’ based manufacturing platforms such as services provided by Li and Fung [2] or discrete part prototyping platforms such as those provided by Xometry [3], Maketime [4], Fictiv [5] and Plethora [6]. The digitalization and globalization has brought in an emerging era of pullmanufacturing eco-systems by connecting consumers with the capabilities of manufacturers and making them available to their customers. With near zero physical assets, these platforms are able to add significant value for platform participants, customers and service providers, by making information available to both parties involved. Consumers trust these platforms to bring in verified manufacturing service providers and lower the cost to sourcing parts from hundreds to thousands of service providers. However such centralized clearing-house type platforms will not make sense in highly regulated markets such as medical, aerospace and military manufacturing, even in the context of short-run production parts. For instance, a medical device startup company will want to know where the manufacturing of its products are carried out since it is an inherent aspect of obtaining FDA clearance on their product. In this scenario, these centralized platforms cannot hide information from each other as it is critical to know the identity and capabilities of service providers.
An alternate implementation would be to build platforms that are decentralized where each partner derives their fair share of value generated from participating in the platform ecosystem. The transparency offered by decentralization and the value offered through distribution of resource allocation can perhaps address the issue of trust determination in a cybermanufacturing network. Each organization inherently trusts only their own processes put in place. Communication across IT systems will require extensive software adaptors and agents to be written for interaction between organizations. This leads to redundant and outdated code that must be constantly rewritten and updated when rapid reconfiguration of system elements must take place.
A solution for enabling such a decentralization mechanism that is rapidly gaining attention from academia and industrial organizations is the concept of a shareable ledger that runs through a permissioned network, called the Blockchain mechanism [7]. This shareable ledger is not owned by any central authority and any authorized participant can view and write to its contents. Qualitative events related to a manufacturer are shared across a network of nodes and the data stored on the blockchain is immutable, hence establishing manufacturing data provenance. Such quantitative provenance was previously hard or expensive to obtain. Any manufacturer can make their organization’s data accessible to any other participant on the network (ex. a client) to help establish an organization’s reputation and hence partially determine trust between two parties. Several white papers have been released with adaptations to the data architecture now being explored in the finance, insurance, agriculture and electronic health records industry [8]. Basic implementations in manufacturing have also emerged in the context of decentralizing 3D printing resource availability and in reevaluating how data integration across manufacturing supply chains are implemented [9]. But this technology is still in its infancy and in our view, there are many manufacturing use case scenarios put forward with Blockchain technology
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