Blockchain technology in industry 4.0

Abstract

Industry 4.0 was initially introduced during the Hannover Fair in 2011. In 2013, it was officially announced as a German strategic initiative to take a pioneering role in industries currently revolutionising the manufacturing sector. Industrie 4.0, also called Industry 4.0, symbolises the beginning of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Industry 4.0 represents the current trend of automation technologies in the manufacturing industry, and it mainly includes enabling technologies such as the cyber-physical systems (CPS), Internet of Things (IoT), and cloud computing (Gorkhali 2022; Karnik et al. 2022; Li 2020; Li & Zhou, 2021; Sigov et al. 2022; Xu 2020). Various technologies can be used to implement Industry 4.0. These technologies include CPS, IoT, cloud computing, industrial information integration, and blockchain technology. World Economic Forum (2015) predicted that by 2027 10% of global GDP will be stored on blockchain technology. In recent years, the interest in studying the role to be played by blockchain in the manufacturing sector has been increasing. As a result, some companies have started integrating the blockchain concept into manufacturing practices (Gorkhali, Li, Shrestha 2020; Xu, Lu, and Li 2021). Potential applications of blockchain in Industry 4.0 include promoting resilience, scalability, security, and autonomy, as well as the usage of blockchain to timestamp sensor data. According to a recent study, Industry 4.0 and blockchain will significantly impact future enterprise information systems. This special issue (SI) aims to allow researchers and practitioners to share the most recent advances in Industry 4.0-related blockchain technologies from enterprise information systems perspectives. To foster a coherent, cumulative body of knowledge regarding blockchain technology in Industry 4.0, this SI presents eight articles authored by scholars from China, Hungary, Thailand, the US, and other countries. In addition, all authors were asked to respond to at least two rounds of peer review to prepare for this issue. In the paper entitled ‘Building trust of Blockchain-based Internet-of-Thing services using public key infrastructure’, Viriyasitavat et al. (2022) introduce a generic architecture design that incorporates Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) to establish the trust in BIoT services. In the paper entitled ‘A novel service level agreement model using blockchain and smart contract for cloud manufacturing in industry 4.0’, Tan et al. (2021) proposed a method to facilitate data security. Szabó, Ternai, and Fodor (2022), in their paper entitled ‘Affordances in blockchain-based financial recommendations concerned with life events and personalities’, aim to discover affordances in blockchain when designing an AI-based financial recommendation system as a decision support system. Bi et al. (2022), in their paper ‘Security and safety assurance of collaborative manufacturing in industry 4.0’, considered that Industry 4.0 provides an ideal platform to support a direct interaction of humans and machines in adapting to changes and uncertainties in system operations. In the paper entitled ‘Blockchain technology–recent research and future trend’ (Zheng and Lu 2021), the authors introduce the future research directions of blockchain. In the ENTERPRISE INFORMATION SYSTEMS 2022, VOL. 16, NO. 12, 1733–1735 https://doi.org/10.1080/17517575.2022.2095535