Designing an Experimental Setup for Incorporating Data Provenance into Blockchain Smart Contracts in a Smart Manufacturing Environment

Data provenance in a Smart Manufacturing Environment process points to the origin of every raw material, processing, packaging, and distributing. The current challenges that necessitated this study stem from the limited research on how end-users can access critical data pertaining to the contents, composition, quantity and timestamp at time of packaging a product. The hypothesis of this study is that if data pertaining to the customer order, raw materials used, timestamp at each stage of production can be included into a blockchain smart contract, it will make the data immutable and traceable, if the need ever arises. To achieve this objective, this paper firstly describes the literature that discusses the current techniques used in achieving data provenance, their limitations and thereby establishing the research gap. Then the paper goes on to describe the proposed experimental setup that was designed to overcome this challenge and finally showcases the results of the experiments for this purpose. This paper utilises the case study of a water bottling plant. The water bottling plant collates end-user orders using an end-user Order Management Application and is made up of three Smart Manufacturing Units. The first unit is designated to fill the water bottles, the second unit caps the bottles and the third unit packs the bottles according to the end-user order. Radio Frequency Identification tags are utilised to store data pertaining to the provenance of a specific order and the data is collected by incorporating various Internet of Things enabled sensors to the respective Smart Manufacturing Units. The results of this novel design process illustrate how the data can be incorporated into the blockchain and thereby, overcome the disadvantages of the existing techniques. The contribution of this paper is that it proposes a solution to allow the end-user to “read” data provenance, through a tag attached on the bottled water for traceability and transparency. The implications of this research are significant, as it introduces an innovative framework that could potentially reduce the size of a recall from millions to just a few hundred units, highlighting the importance of this research study.