Abstract
Digital transformation strengthens the interconnection of companies in order to develop optimized and better customized, cross-company business models. These models require secure, reliable, and traceable evidence and monitoring of contractually agreed information to gain trust between stakeholders. Blockchain technology using smart contracts allows the industry to establish trust and automate cross-company business processes without the risk of losing data control. A typical cross-company industry use case is equipment maintenance. Machine manufacturers and service providers offer maintenance for their machines and tools in order to achieve high availability at low costs. The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate how maintenance use cases are attempted by utilizing hyperledger fabric for building a chain of trust by hardened evidence logging of the maintenance process to achieve legal certainty. Contracts are digitized into smart contracts automating business that increase the security and mitigate the error-proneness of the business processes.
TopIndustry Needs Trust
Trust surrounds us everywhere in everyday life (Rutter, 2001). Customers trust restaurants to follow the hygiene regulations and banks to handle their money responsibly. In business, companies work together with financial obligations up to hundreds of million dollars. Cooperation between companies without trust is impossible. Building trust between companies has become more difficult with frequently changing cooperation partners due to the fast-paced nature of todays’ economy. Sako et al. (1998) defined four core aspects for successful cooperation; that all boil down to trust, viz.:
Key Terms in this Chapter
Channel: A Hyperledger Fabric Channel provides private and confidential communication and represents a blockchain. Transactions are executed on a channel which are stored in the channel’s ledger. Channels are used to hide certain information from specific Organizations.
Orderer: This is a node type in Hyperledger Fabric. A group of Orderers form the ordering service, responsible for establishing the correct order of all transactions. In the process of ordering consensus (agreement) of the transactions is achieved. Hyperledger Fabric features three consensus implementations: Solo (for development purposes), Kafka (a crash fault tolerant consensus implementation), and Raft (a crash fault tolerant consensus algorithm).
ESR: This Epson T3-401S SCARA robot - a versatile entry-level robot solution for production lines.
Shop Floor: The area where assembly or production is carried out, either by an automated system or by workers. This includes equipment, inventory, and storage areas.
Peer: This is a node type in Hyperledger Fabric that provides access to the channels, executes smart contracts and keeps a copy of the Ledger. Peers validate the transactions to establish consensus. Peer communicate with each via is handled via Peer-to-peer communication.
Membership Service Provider: The Membership Service Provider (MSP) issues and maintains the identities of all nodes in the Hyperledger Fabric system. Issuing and maintaining the identities is handled via standard PKI methods based on digital signatures. Nodes take up to one of three roles: Client (executing the smart contract), Peers (maintaining a copy the blockchain and validation of the transaction), and Orderer (establishing the order of all transactions).
Organization: Hyperledger Fabric uses Organizations to structure the stakeholders inside the network. Every user is part of an Organization which determines his access rights. Each Organization forms a trust domain, such that a node with the Organization trusts all node within the Organization but no node of another Organization. Each Organization issues the identities for its own members.
Smart Contract: Template: Smart Contract Templates (SCT) reduce the required knowledge for defining a smart contract. A developer familiar with blockchain develops a smart contract that covers a wide range of possibilities and the SCT. The end user of the smart contract only needs to fill in parameters such as conditions and values. Resulting code represents a fully functional smart contract that can be used within the blockchain.
Chaincode: Smart Contracts are called Chaincode in Hyperledger Fabric. These are small computer programs that are executed in a distributed manner and represent a digitalised version of previously paper-based contracts. In Hyperledger Fabric, smart contracts can be programmed in Go, Java or Node.js and thus provide ease of use for the programmer. The process of executing the smart contracts is called a transaction.
Hyperledger Fabric: Hyperledger Fabric is a permissioned blockchain infrastructure, originally contributed by IBM and Digital Asset, providing a modular architecture with a delineation of roles between the nodes in the infrastructure, execution of Smart Contracts (called "chaincode" in Fabric) and configurable consensus and membership services.