Leveraging the Capabilities of Industry 4.0 for Improving Energy Efficiency in Smart Factories

Abstract

Factories use many manufacturing processes that consume a lot of energy and highly contribute to greenhouse gas emissions. The introduction of the concept of Industrial Internet in USA and Industry 4.0 in Europe offers many opportunities to reduce energy consumption in these factories. Introducing and utilizing smart techniques for the applications pertinent to manufacturing processes within the Industry 4.0 domain can offer many benefits for reducing energy consumption in smart factories. This paper investigates and discusses these opportunities and benefits. This paper also discusses the roles of Industry 4.0 technologies in enabling these opportunities. Consequently, introducing these capabilities will help significantly reduce both production costs and greenhouse gas emissions. This paper then provides a benefit analysis that shows the advantages of such leverage. In addition, this paper offers an enabling architecture and its components that include a cyber-physical system manufacturing services' layer, a fog manufacturing services' layer, a cloud manufacturing services' layer, and a blockchain-based service-oriented middleware to support such opportunities.

Blockchain for Industry 4.0: A Comprehensive Review

“…Proper usage of non-renewable resources has become mandatory due to their scarcity. The use of renewable energy sources such as solar power or wind can leverage energy efficiency to maintain the ecosystem [84]. Hence nowadays, most of the countries encourage their people to use renewable energy resources for the growth of their industries, agriculture, and transportation.…”

Integrating Blockchain in Safety-Critical Systems: An Application to the Nuclear Industry

“…In [21] ARC examined 24 blockchain pilots applied to the industry and identified the business improvements described in Table 1. Other state-ofthe-art papers which deal with industrial blockchain are [22], [23] and [24].…”

A Review on the Application of Blockchain to the Next Generation of Cybersecure Industry 4.0 Smart Factories

“…Similarly, the architecture and the possible optimizations to be performed for creating and deploying blockchain-based IoT applications are detailed in [18]. Other articles focused on the application of blockchain to specific Industry 4.0 technologies like big data [19], to specific industries [20], [21], [22] or important characteristics like energy efficiency [23]. It is also worth mentioning the systematic reviews presented in [24] and [25], which analyze the topics that papers in the literature deal with when proposing the use of blockchain.…”