Smart distributed ledger technologies in industry 4.0: Challenges and opportunities in supply chain management

Abstract

The rise of new digital economies and data-driven supply-chains seeks to revolutionalise the ways information is transferred, processed and analysed across different industry segments in the value-creation. This data-driven manufacturing revolution promises to increase productivity, democratise data sharing capabilities and foster industrial growth in scales never seen before. The traditional transactional models are to be re-visited, and distributed data storage architectures are to be re-designed to accommodate for optimised data flows across different organisation units. Data is increasingly becoming a strategic business resource that through innovation in existing sharing and processing approaches can decompose business bottlenecks in existing production lines and processes and disrupt traditional supply-chain models. This work seeks to articulate a state-of-the-art review of the application and impact of ML techniques and distributed Ledger technologies to further disrupt supply-chain capabilities with regards to data accuracy and completeness.