A review of features and applications of distributed ledger technologies for smart manufacturing

Among the different smart technologies with the highest digitalisation capacity for manufacturing environments, distributed ledger technologies (DLT) has the potential to support one of the main challenges to be faced in the new environment created by the Industry 4.0 paradigm, i.e., the interchange of data through the supply chain. DLT enhances data immutability and transparency and offers new possibilities of interactions and business models to the new industrial networks, allowing a trustable horizontal and vertical data flow between different organisations. Although these possible improvements are in sight, the approach and characteristics that can make the technology suitable with the I4.0 paradigm, are not yet well-defined, and in some cases puzzling for industry managers. In this paper, possible applications, features of DLTs and its available types are reviewed and analysed, giving a clear definition of the most relevant characteristics that these technologies can offer to manufacturing industry.