A systematic survey of blockchain-enabled artificial intelligence for industrial IoT: recent advances, integration challenges, and future prospects

Abstract

In the rapidly evolving landscape of technology, Blockchain (BC), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Smart Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) are leading and promising technologies in the world that facilitate the current society to develop the quality of living and make it simpler for users. However, these technologies have been applied in various domains for different purposes. These technologies successfully assist in developing the desired system, such as smart cities, homes, education, and industries. Moreover, these technologies need to address various issues–security, privacy, confidentiality, scalability, and application challenges in diverse fields. Most importantly, while considerable studies have researched the fusion of these technologies, this study stands out considering that it provides a comprehensive survey analysis based on a PRISMA-guided assessment of 295 peer-reviewed studies, focusing on the integration challenges and coordinated benefits of incorporating blockchain and AI into smart IIoT environments. In particular, this survey highlights unexplored research gaps and future directions pertaining to scalability, latency, security, and real-time industrial deployment while offering a structured analytical framework and a methodical organization of Blockchain-enabled AI integration approaches for Industrial IoT. Unlike previous reviews, this survey explores an in-depth analysis of these technologies’ practical applications and security implications, addressing crucial gaps in the existing literature. In this context, with the increasing demand for solutions to these issues, the authors present a detailed survey on the AI approaches with BC in the smart IIoT. Firstly, we focus on state-of-the-art overviews regarding AI, BC, and smart IIoT applications. Then, we identified the benefits of integrating these technologies and discuss the established methods, tools, and strategies efficiently. Most importantly, we highlight the various issues–security, stability, scalability, and confidentiality and guide the way of addressing strategy and methods. Furthermore, the individual and collaborative benefits of applications have been discussed. Lastly, we extensively focused on the open research challenges and potential future guidelines based on BC-based AI approaches in the intelligent IIoT system.