Mass customized/personalized manufacturing in Industry 4.0 and blockchain: Research challenges, main problems, and the design of an information architecture

Abstract

Mass customized and mass personalized production has become facilitated by the fourth industrial revolution. The resulting industrial environments require the development of information systems able to take the specifications of customers and convey them to the production system in such a way as to contribute to the coordination of all the stakeholders and activities required to fulfill the orders of the customers. This is beyond the capabilities of traditional systems based on MRP and ERP, since the information should be managed in a flexible and decentralized way to exploit the Smart Manufacturing facilities of Industry 4.0. Blockchain, instead, is a technology that provides those features constituting a sound information supporting basis for mass customized/personalized production. Consequently, we explore the potential of blockchain as an information technology able to support industries that base their business models on mass customized/personalized production processes. This survey allows us to identify important challenges for further developments, highlighting three issues in the production setting: (i) to deepen the interoperability of systems, (ii) to generate more implementations, and (iii) to develop efficient consensus protocols. As a response to these insights we provide a conceptual design of how blockchain contributes to managing efficiently mass customized production systems. In our design the information of customer specifications can be fused with data from the production process to generate a plan to fulfill the demand. This design arises as a solution approach to three stated problem, which are faced by mass customized production systems.