Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)

The emerging blockchain technology and the artificial intelligence(AI) shows promising potential to enhance industrial systems and the Internet of things (IoT) by providing applications with redundancy, immutable storage, and encryption. In the past a few years, many more applications in industrial IoT (IIoT) have emerged and the blockchain technologies have attracted huge amounts of attention from both industrial and academic researchers. As a subset of the broader IoT, the IIoT is dramatically changing the way industries work by interconnecting facilities, systems and creating new business models. Despite of the aforementioned potentials, the IIoT is also facing a number of challenges, including interoperability, devices security and privacy, silo mentality, standardization, etc. The complicated IIoT system exposes industrial control system (ICS), process control systems, and other operational technologies to potential cyber attacks, hacktivism, employment sabotage and other security risks.

 

In IIoT systems, the IIoT platform plays a key role that can deliver smart connected operations, connect assets, and enable IIoT with following capabilities: connectivity, big data analytic, and application development. The IIoT features to build the intelligent smart ecosystems of IIoT solutions, while the blockchain can address the IIoT interoperability, reliability, and security challenges. Introducing blockchain into IIoT will enable industrial enterprises and manufactures to register and verify both their physical entities  and services features  in an irrefutable and decentralised network . From the viewpoint of IIoT developers, the blockchain standardisation will play a key role in shaping the future of the technology. The blockchain standardization should be able to provide guidance to developers and users of blockchain technology. The AI and blockchain enabled IIoT is still facing many challenges that must be addressed before it can be widely accepted and deployed in industries