Decentralized Digital Manufacturing, Challenges and Future Trends

Abstract

We are in the midst of a transitional age where the digital revolution is breaking traditional walls and reshaping all sectors, including manufacturing. Digital Manufacturing, characterized as one of the rapidly growing disruptive technologies, integrates the digital technologies of Industry 4.0 and computers into the manufacturing processes. Moreover, the Digital Manufacturing associated with value-added networks displaces conventional supply chains, reducing time-to-market while ensuring quality and containing costs. However, manufacturers adopting the digital transformation are still facing many problems that we aim to address in this research by integrating Industry 4.0 Blockchain and Machine Learning technologies into Digital Manufacturing. Among these problems are ensuring that products are traceable, preserving intellectual property, certifying and assuring quality of digitally manufactured parts, evaluating the economic viability and technical feasibility of digitally manufactured parts, and reconfiguring and optimizing supply chains. In this research, we develop models for enabling changes in supply processes, to be specific, we concentrate first on obtaining the optimal configuration of the supply network processes, like optimizing scheduling in small-scale workshops in a distributed net- work. Secondly, we propose a machine learning algorithm for a more convenient and faster evaluation and detection of economically viable and technically feasible parts to be digitally manufactured. The method is based on active learning for parts selection. That is, we calculate a ranking and iteratively improve it. Furthermore, we show that the quality of our proposed method improves with the number of iterations in the sense that the percentage of positively assessed parts tends to increase. Thirdly, to address the data security and traceability challenge, we have developed novel Blockchain-based solutions for digitally manufactured products to ensure secure and trusted traceability, accessibility, immutability, and data provenance among stakeholders. Fourthly, we address the Covid-19 pandemic, which played an integral role as a transition accelerator from traditional to Digital Manufacturing. Therefore, we developed a Blockchain-based solution to address the challenges of enabling decentralized, flexible, and traceable healthcare digital production that fulfills the pandemic’s sudden demand peaks. Finally, we develop a solution based on Blockchain and NFTs that are critical enablers for implementing Quality 4.0 in Digital Manufacturing, utilizing Ethereum smart contracts that govern, automate, and ensure transactions are immutable and tamperproof. The proposed Blockchain-based solutions have been successfully implemented, tested, and validated. The results showed that the solutions are well secured against well-known attacks and vulnerabilities and that they are economically efficient.

Date of Award	Dec 2022
Original language	American English
Supervisor	Andrei Sleptchenko (Supervisor)