Agreements between Enterprises digitized by Smart Contracts in the Domain of Industry 4.0
It addresses the need for reliable digital agreements in enterprise collaborations, but appears incremental as it applies existing blockchain and smart contract methods to a specific domain.
The paper tackles the problem of secure and traceable information sharing for cross-company business models in Industry 4.0 by using blockchain and smart contracts, showing that the number of failures is significantly improved.
The digital transformation of companies is expected to increase the digital interconnection between different companies to develop optimized, customized, hybrid business models. These cross-company business models require secure, reliable, and traceable logging and monitoring of contractually agreed information sharing between machine tools, operators, and service providers. This paper discusses how the major requirements for building hybrid business models can be tackled by the blockchain for building a chain of trust and smart contracts for digitized contracts. A machine maintenance use case is used to discuss the readiness of smart contracts for the automation of workflows defined in contracts. Furthermore, it is shown that the number of failures is significantly improved by using these contracts and a blockchain.