Abstract
Internet of things (IoT) technology is poised to change the flow of data handling for tangible and intangible assets in textile production and utilization industries. It is reinventing global textile manufacturing operations, product distribution, and how manufacturers exchange value. For example, IoT technology helps gather operational data, store it, process it, and improve business efficiency. However, IoT technology-based textile production and its supply chain's information systems are highly vulnerable to security, privacy, and trust-related issues. This chapter presents the basic design and operation constraints that intelligent textile industries expect to experience within modern wireless data communication networks (e.g., 4G, 5G) with IoT technology and how blockchain technology can mitigate these constraints (e.g., privacy and security). The advantages of blockchain-based computing are its ability to scale rapidly, store data remotely, and provide service in a dynamic environment. Finally, this chapter presents a hybrid (i.e., IoT, blockchain, service-oriented computing) data processing architecture for the textile industries.
TopIntroduction
Textile production and distribution industries are an integral part of modern society. However, its evolution has been taking place for a long time. Since the first industrial revolution about two hundred and fifty years ago, global production has experienced revolutions. For example, very recently, the fifth industrial revolution (or industry 5.0) has attracted the interest of academics and practitioners to use the innovative ideas of artificial intelligence (AI) to eradicate global technological poverty. At the same time, practitioners are expressing their views of the future of the production industry over the coming decades, which will not be a linear extrapolation for the current business practice. Instead, there are many scenarios – each with multiple paths to get from where the production industry is today to an unknown tomorrow. The scenarios arise from the complex interplay between a range of future factors: (i) socio-demographic changes and rapidly evolving values, needs, and expectations of the general public and societies, (ii) political and economic shift, (iii) alternative possible trajectories for energy, resources, the environment, biodiversity, and sustainability, (iv) new system science-based business thinking and the consequences of an increasingly globalized business landscape, and (v) progressive and innovative developments across different disciplines supported by modern science and technology with potential disruptive impact.
Today production industry's evolution is centred on information technology (IT), information and communication technology (ICT), and operation technology (OT). It is ushering conventional computer-aided production to 'smart production' featured with data-driven decision-making (Pal, 2021). During this change in thinking, the internet of things (IoT) technology plays a vital role in connecting the physical production workplace to the digital information systems in the cyberspace of computing systems. This way, a new generation of cyber-physical systems (CPSs) control industrial production and its supply chain management (SCM).
In a typical production supply chain, raw materials are purchased from suppliers and products are manufactured at one or more production plants. Then the product moves to an intermediate storage space (e.g., warehouse, distribution centres) for packing and sending for shipping to retailers or customers. In this way, a production supply chain consists of network business partners, suppliers, transporters, manufacturers, distributors, retailers, and customers (Pal, 2019) (Pal, 2017). Different researchers reported various aspects of supply chain operations management-related issues. Academics (Gao & Li, 2018) reported the importance of supply chain coordination. A group of researchers (Lebosse et al., 2017) reviewed the concept of agility in supply chain operations. Artour Taghipour highlighted the importance of planning a manufacturing network with non-integrated business units (Taghipour, 2014). The importance of negotiation-based coordination has been presented by a group of researchers (Taghipour & Frayer, 2010), and other relevant issues were highlighted by various research groups (Taghipour & Merimi, 2021) (Gao et al., 2018) (Glaa et al., 2014) (Husna et al., 2021) (Lebosse et al., 2017) (Mbiatem et al., 2018) (Ren et al., 2016) (Taghipour & Frayret, 2013) (Taghipour & Frayret, 2010) (Taghipour, 2009) (Taghipour, 2014). A simple diagrammatic representation of a textile production supply chain is shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Diagrammatic representation of a production supply chain
Key Terms in this Chapter
Supply Chain Management: A supply chain consists of a network of key business processes and facilities, involving end-users and suppliers that provide products, services, and information. In this chain management, improving the efficiency of the overall chain is an influential factor; and it needs at least four important strategic issues to be considered: supply chain network design, capacity planning, risk assessment and management, and performances monitoring and measurement. Moreover, the details break down of these issues need to consider in the level of individual business processes and sub-processes, and the combined performance of this chain. The coordination of these huge business processes and their performance improvement are the main objectives of a supply chain management system.
Blockchain: In simple, a blockchain is just a data structure that can be shared by different users using computing data communication network (e.g., peer-to-peer or P2P). Blockchain is a distributed data structure comprising a chain of blocks. It can act as a global ledger that maintains records of all transactions on a blockchain network. The transactions are time-stamped and bundled into blocks where each block is identified by its cryptographic hash .
Block: A block is a data structure used to communicate incremental changes to the local state of a node. It consists of a list of transactions, a reference to a previous block and a nonce.
Provenance: In a blockchain ledger, provenance is a way to trace the origin of every transaction such that there is no dispute about the origin and sequence of the transactions in the ledger.
Immutability: This term refers to the fact that blockchain transactions cannot be deleted or altered.
Internet of Things (IoT): The Internet of Things (IoT), also called the Internet of Everything or the Industrial Internet, is now a technology paradigm envisioned as a global network of machines and devices capable of interacting with each other. The IoT is recognized as one of the most critical areas of future technology and is gaining vast attention from a wide range of industries.
Decentralized Computing Infrastructure: These computing infrastructures feature computing nodes that can make independent processing and computational decisions irrespective of what other peer computing nodes may decide.
Warehouse: A warehouse can also be called a storage area, and it is a commercial building where raw materials or goods are stored by suppliers, exporters, manufacturers, or wholesalers, they are constructed and equipped with tools according to special standards depending on the purpose of their use.
Cryptography: Blockchain’s transactions achieve validity, trust, and finality based on cryptographic proofs and underlying mathematical computations between various trading partners.