Biblio

Trust along digitalized supply chains is challenged by the aspect that monitoring equipment may not be trustworthy or unreliable as respective measurements originate from potentially untrusted parties. To allow for dynamic relationships along supply chains, we propose a blockchain-backed supply chain monitoring architecture relying on trusted hardware. Our design provides a notion of secure end-to-end sensing of interactions even when originating from untrusted surroundings. Due to attested checkpointing, we can identify misinformation early on and reliably pinpoint the origin. A blockchain enables long-term verifiability for all (now trustworthy) IoT data within our system even if issues are detected only after the fact. Our feasibility study and cost analysis further show that our design is indeed deployable in and applicable to today’s supply chain settings.

Industry 4.0 and the Internet of Production can increase efficiency and effectiveness of workflows in manufacturing companies and production networks. Despite ubiquitous automation, people are essential in socio-technical cyber-physical production systems due to unique cognitive capabilities, as final arbitrators, or for ethical and legal reasons. However, the design of interfaces between the human-in-the-loop and production systems poses challenges not yet been sufficiently elaborated in research and practice. We present two behavioural studies in the context of inter-company collaboration that show why considering the human-in-the-loop is crucial: The first study shows that information complexity and individual differences shape the overall decision quality. With increasing information complexity, the decision speed decreases and the decision accuracy descends. Consequently, a fine balance between necessary, abundant, and superfluous information must be found. The second experiment studies human decision making in complex environments using a business simulation. We found that correct decision aids can augment the human-in-the-loop's decision making and that these can increase usability, trust, and proft. Yet, incorrect decision support has the opposite effect. Guidelines for designing socio-technical cyber-physical production systems and a research agenda conclude this article.