Are Machines With Wallets The Next Big Issue In Industry 4.0?

"Give a little boy a hammer and he will find that anything he comes across must be struck."

Abraham Kaplan

This quote describes exactly how researchers in industry and science tend to approach new problems. When I first became aware of “Blockchain” with the kind permission of an enthusiastic colleague, it just seemed like another hammer. In order to support him in his work - and to experience a certain amount of FOMO - I decided to help him find actual use cases for Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) in our manufacturing and Industry 4.0 area.

The idea: How can Industry 4.0 benefit from blockchain technology?

Industry 4.0 aims to turn machines into intelligent, context-sensitive and autonomous agents that are connected to their environment. This is a good start, but we need to go a step further. We have to imagine moving away from centralized production in the form of traditional facilities. According to our vision, every machine that could possibly play a role in a production process could autonomously be part of a production line with other machines worldwide. To make this possible, machines - apart from the classic functions of the administration shell - must, in our opinion, be able to set, negotiate and, above all, exchange values ​​with other machines. Assuming an intelligent machine equals an employee, we want to turn intelligent machines into entrepreneurs and their (human) owners into their shareholders.

Our prototype: machines that pay for themselves autonomously

The prototype we created is best described as a wallet that machines can use to form a network of service providers. This network consists of production machines, transport devices or other devices such as sensors that can be distributed globally. To interact with this network, we created a web-based user interface that allows products to be dragged and dropped onto the network. The user can then adjust product attributes (ie quality, quantity or delivery date). A display shows how information on current orders and individual offers is transmitted over the network.

The user is then shown a price based on the current negotiation status. Based on this information, the user can decide whether to place an order or not. As soon as an order has been placed, the interface executes an IOTA transaction and the respective machines receive the command to start production at the same time.

The price is calculated on the basis of the individual offers of the individual machines in the network. So that the machines can participate in this market, we have implemented a small multi-agent system and a preliminary communication protocol for the negotiation process. As soon as each machine has calculated its offer price, this is sent to the interface where the best offer is displayed.

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We had three "machines" in our network. One of them was a lathe from Weisser. The computer had an OPC UA server that we used as an end point for incoming messages. We built the other two machines using a range of Lego Mindstorms. Communication between the agents was implemented using MQTT.

To a large extent, we have also implemented a telegram bot as an interface between the machines and their respective (human) owners. In our prototype we were able to monitor the progress of the manufacturing process. Other interesting uses include maintenance and / or emergency messages.

Although we implemented some of the functions described in a rudimentary way, the prototype still gave us the opportunity to carry out a practical study of a small M2M economy and to identify further development paths. The general feedback has been incredibly positive and we've had some extremely interesting negotiations with various companies since the hackathon. Reason enough for us to develop this idea further!

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The journey continues: our next steps and what we have learned so far

We are currently combining the developed software with other hardware in our laboratory at TU Vienna.

We are using an industrial robot that can autonomously paint custom images based on photos. To do this, however, this robot needs several auxiliary services, including paint supply, brush cleaning, and image drying.

This animated graphic shows use cases for Industry 4.0 machines that autonomously form a network and pay each other with the help of IOTA as a distributed ledger technology. Source: Benjamin Mörzinger / TU Vienna User interaction and processes for the next prototype

Customers only interact with the robot, which in turn negotiates autonomously with its own supplier and pays for the services provided.

In this new scenario, we are less satisfied with IOTA as our chosen distributed ledger technology. This is because our use case will most likely require smart contracts which IOTA does not yet support. At the same time, however, we're also thinking about other data-related use cases where IOTA could be a good choice. Once we have completed our current development phase, we will focus on finding alternatives.

This topic has become one of my main research interests. As a result, my group has joined a research consortium that is applying as the first competence center for distributed ledger technology in Austria. If you would like to follow our progress, please visit our homepage or visit us at our booth at the Intertool in Vienna.

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