Energy Saving by Blockchaining Maintenance

The development and interest in Industry 4.0 together with rapid development of Cyber Physical Systems has created magnificent opportunities to develop maintenance to a totally new level. The Maintenance 4.0 vision considers massive exploitation of information regarding factories and machines to improve maintenance efficiency and efficacy, for example by facilitating logistics of spare parts, but on the other hand this creates other logistics issues on the data itself, which only exacerbate data management issues that emerge when distributed maintenance platforms scale up. In fact, factories can be delocalized with respect to the data centers, where data has to be transferred to be processed. Moreover, any transaction needs communication, be it related to purchase of spare parts, sales contract, and decisions making in general, and it has to be verified by remote parties. Keeping in mind the current average level of Overall Equipment Efficiency (50%) i.e. there is a hidden factory behind every factory, the potential is huge. It is expected that most of this potential can be realised based on the use of the above named technologies, and relying on a new approach called blockchain technology, the latter aimed at facilitating data and transactions management. Blockchain supports logistics by a distributed ledger to record transactions in a verifiable and permanent way, thus removing the need for multiple remote parties to verify and store every transaction made, in agreement with the first “r” of maintenance (reduce, repair, reuse, recycle). Keeping in mind the total industrial influence on the consumption of natural resources, such as energy, the new technology advancements can allow for dramatic savings, and can deliver important contributions to the green economy that Europe aims for. The paper introduces the novel technologies that can support sustainability of manufacturing and industry at large, and proposes an architecture to bind together said technologies to realise the vision of Maintenance 4.0.