Robotics and Computer–Integrated Manufacturing 70 (2021) 102124

Available online 25 January 2021

Review

Industrial Blockchain: A state-of-the-art Survey

Z. Li

, Ray Y. Zhong

, Z.G. Tian

, Hong-Ning Dai

, Ali Vatankhah Barenji

George Q. Huang

Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Computer Integrated Manufacturing Systems, School of Electromechanical Engineering, Guangdong University of Technology,

Guangzhou, Guangdong, China

Department of Mechanical and Energy Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China

HKU-ZIRI Lab for Physical Internet, Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

Faculty of Information Technology, Macau University of Science and Technology, Macao, China

H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA

ARTICLE INFO

Keywords:

Industrial Blockchain

supply chain

manufacturing

literature review

ABSTRACT

As an underlying and backbone technology of Bitcoin, Blockchain attracted extensive attention worldwide in

recent years due to its unique characteristics of decentralization, openness, immutability, anonymity, etc., which

enables it to build a trust basis through recording the point-to-point decentralized transactions in an immutable

way via the attached timestamp, thereby improving system efciency and reducing the cost without relying on

the central agent. As it is considered to be a potentially revolutionary technology, Blockchain has been intro-

duced into various industrial elds including nance, supply chain, manufacturing, healthcare, energy, and

smart city. In this paper, we conduct a state-of-the-art survey of industrial Blockchain in terms of published

articles between 2017 and 2020, and worldwide Blockchain movement including North America, Europe, and

the Asia Pacic region so far. We conduct a statistic analysis of the collected articles in terms of three dimensions,

which are year of publication, leading research institutes and researchers, and article classication to present a

multi-dimensional trend or conclusion. Besides, we analyse articles that are cited over a certain number of times

in detail to investigate the hot research directions. Finally, the challenges, opportunities, and future perspectives

are discussed to summarize the main obstacles of industrial Blockchain and identify the open research questions

in the near future.

1. Introduction

Blockchain technology has grabbed global attention with the pros-

perity of Bitcoin, which was originally proposed by Satoshi Nakamoto

[1] in 2008. It is a new application paradigm of multiple computer

technologies including asymmetric encryption, distributed network,

peer-to-peer transmission, smart contract, and consensus mechanism,

etc. to create permanent, immutable, authorized and time-stamped re-

cords of transactions, which enables it to establish mutual trust at low

costs in an untrusted competitive environment without any third parties.

Although Blockchain was designed as the underlying technology of

cryptocurrency originally, the application potential of Blockchain is

already far beyond nance. Practitioners of many elds are exploring

the application scenarios of Blockchain in various sectors, and many

Blockchain application scenarios have been studied and researched such

as nance [2–4], supply chain [5–7], healthcare [8–10], energy

[11–13], manufacturing [14–16], and smart city [17–19]. Moreover,

many countries and regions have conducted researches and evaluations

on Blockchain. North America occupied the largest market share of

global Blockchain technology [20]. The U.S. and Canada have actively

regulated cryptocurrencies while encouraging Blockchain-based re-

searches and innovations. In Europe, the European Union has committed

to providing reliable data security and privacy for international business

by establishing a unied Blockchain service infrastructure. In the Asia

Pacic, Blockchain technology innovations are also encouraged in some

main countries. Also, there have been some Blockchain initiatives

worldwide so far, such as Enterprise Operation System (EOS), Hyper-

ledger, Corda. Blockchain is shifting the application paradigm and

operating rules of many industries through its unique trust-building

mechanism.

Although a large number of application scenarios based on Block-

chain technology had been conceived or proposed, and Blockchain

* Corresponding author.

E-mail address: gqhuang@hku.hk (G.Q. Huang).

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Robotics and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing

journal homepage: www.cryptoforexleads.pw

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rcim.2021.102124

Received 2 October 2019; Received in revised form 30 November 2020; Accepted 12 January 2021

Robotics and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing 70 (2021) 102124

seems to be a potentially revolutionary technology in the future, there

are still many challenges and limitations when putting Blockchain

technology into practice. The main aims of this paper are to investigate

recent Blockchain applications in industrial elds including nance,

supply chain, manufacturing, healthcare, energy, and smart city to

present a state-of-the-art of Blockchain. Besides, the worldwide Block-

chain movement including North America, Europe, and the Asia Pacic

region so far are also surveyed to identify the current situation of

Blockchain technology in the world.

We conduct a statistic analysis of the collected articles in terms of

three dimensions, which are year of publication, leading research in-

stitutes and researchers, and article classication to present a multi-

dimensional trend or conclusion. Besides, we analyse articles that are

cited over a certain number of times in detail to investigate the hot

research directions. Finally, the challenges, opportunities, and future

perspectives are discussed to summarize the main obstacles of industrial

Blockchain and identify the open research questions in the near future.

Our contributions are stated as follows: (1) Existing surveys and re-

views typically concentrate on some specic topics or elds of Block-

chain application, and most of them lack the movement and

development worldwide of Blockchain. We investigated the movement

and development worldwide to present the current situation of Block-

chain. (2) Articles on the Blockchain are analysed according to three

dimensions, namely year of publication, leading research institutes, and

researchers, to illustrate the development characteristics and trends of

Blockchain-related research with visualization statistical data. (3) The

challenges, opportunities, and future perspectives of Blockchain appli-

cation are comprehensively discussed to identify the open research is-

sues on applying Blockchain practically in the future.

The remaining parts of this paper mainly consist of the following

sections. Section 2 presents the survey method and analyses the

collected articles from three dimension. Section 3 introduces an over-

view of Blockchain technology in terms of architecture, key enabling

technologies, and representative initiatives. The industrial Blockchain

applications are presented in Section 4. Section 5 mainly summarizes the

current development and application of Blockchain worldwide,

including North America, Europe, and the Asia Pacic. Discussion about

the current challenges, opportunities, and future perspectives of Block-

chain technology in industries is provided in Section 6.

2. Statistics and Survey Analysis

2.1. Survey Method

The survey method of this article is shown in Fig. 1. Following

criteria were applied to enhance the credibility of the results.

(1) The survey was conducted based on the Web of Science database.

The core collection was selected, and the citation indexes in-

cludes SCI-E, SSCI, and CPCI-S.

(2) The key words used for the search are ‘Blockchain’ and ‘elds’. i.

e. ‘Blockchain’ AND ‘Finan* OR Fintech’; ‘Blockchain’ AND

‘Supply chain’; ‘Blockchain’ AND ‘Healthcare’; ‘Blockchain’ AND

‘Energy’; ‘Blockchain’ AND ‘Manufacturing’, and ‘Blockchain’

AND ‘Smart city’. The search scope is the ‘topic’ (the title, ab-

stract, keywords, and keywords plus were included).

(3) To ensure the credibility of the survey, only English articles that

published between 2017 and 2020 (to date) were considered.

(4) The search result was rened manually to lter out the papers

whose focus outside the six elds. Nearly 600 papers were

collected. To ensure the referable value of the collected papers,

we conducted the further ltering to select the papers whose cited

times are no less than 10. Ultimately, over 80 papers were

retained.

The collected papers were analysed in terms of three dimensions,

namely year of publication, leading research institutes and researchers,

and article classication to better understand the research trends, the

Fig. 1. Survey method.

Z. Li et al.

Robotics and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing 70 (2021) 102124

leading institutes and researchers, and the research progress of

Blockchain.

2.2. Dimension 1. Year of publication

The number of papers published each year reects the Blockchain

development and research status. The number increases in all six elds

in recent four years according to the statistics. Specically, the numbers

of publication in manufacturing, supply chain are presented in Fig. 2.

The number of papers in the two areas is projected to continue to grow

steadily. Besides, the total of publication in industrial blockchain (the six

elds) is also presented. It obviously saw a rapid increase during the

four-year period.

2.3. Dimension 2. Leading Research Institutes and Researchers

Analysis of the institutes and researchers involved reveal the fore-

runner and outstanding researchers of Blockchain research. By sorting

the papers published between 2017-2019 and the cited times is no less

than 10, and counting the number of times each author appears and

their institutes, the numbers of papers from each institute were ob-

tained. A total of 11 institutions published at least two papers.

As shown in Fig. 3. The largest number of papers originate from

Guangdong University of Technology, Seoul National University of

Science and Technology, and the University of Hong Kong, followed by

Shanghai University. These four institutes are the main source of

Blockchain research and are hosts to the predominant scholars in this

eld.

Since the number of papers from each institute does not consider the

situation where a paper has multiple authors belonging to different in-

stitutions, it is necessary to present a co-occurrence network diagram of

leading researchers to show their collaborations. Leading researchers on

the Blockchain can be recognized by counting the number of papers

published by different authors. By counting the number of occurrences

of each author and the number of co-occurrence of two authors among

the papers, a co-occurrence network diagram of the leading researchers

was obtained. The authors and their co-authors other than the above

four institutes are removed to simplify the network diagram.

The network diagram shows the collaborative relationships of each

author in Fig. 4. Among the researchers shown in the gure, Li, Zhi and

Huang, George Q have studied the theories and key technologies of

Blockchain in manufacturing eld. Kang, Jiawen focus on the energy

trading using Blockchain technology. Park, Jong Hyuk afliated with

Seoul National University of Science and Technology mainly studies the

application of Blockchain in smart city. Su Zhou of Shanghai University

focuses on energy transmission and energy security in the energy elds.

2.4. Dimension 3. Article Classication

In order to understand the depth of current Blockchain research, we

dene three stages, namely conceptual stage, verication stage, and

application stage for the collected papers and classify them according to

the contents. Papers that only propose a framework or an approach, or

conducts theoretical analysis will be sorted out as conceptual stage.

Those which build a mathematical model or conduct instance-based

study, or conduct a proof-of-concept, or carry out a simulation, or

develop a prototype will be categorized as verication stage. Papers that

include practical application of Blockchain or real case studies or use

cases will be identied as application stage.

As shown in Fig. 5, papers published between 2017-2019 that

belonging to different stages in six elds are counted. In the eld of

nance, supply chain, and healthcare, the theoretical research accounts

for over a half. While in the eld of energy, manufacturing, and smart

city, the verication research overweighs the theoretical research and

application research.

3. Blockchain Overview

In this section, we give an overview of Blockchain in terms of the

architecture, key enabling technologies, and representative initiatives.

3.1. Architecture

Generally, a Blockchain system consists of a data layer, a network

layer, a consensus layer, an incentive layer, a contract layer, and an

application layer [21]. The data layer encapsulates the underlying data

blocks, which includes hash values, time stamps, transaction informa-

tion, public and private keys etc. [22]. The network layer involves

peer-to-peer (P2P) networking mechanism, data broadcasting mecha-

nism, data verication mechanism, etc. Blockchain network is essen-

tially a P2P network. The resources and services in the network are

scattered on each node, and the transmission of information and the

realization of services are carried out directly between nodes without

the intervention of intermediate links or centralized servers (third

parties). Nodes synchronize information through the network layer to

jointly maintain the ledger of the entire network. The network layer

enables the Blockchain to be automatically networked [23]. The

consensus layer encapsulates the consensus algorithm and consensus

mechanism, such as PoW, POS, and DPoS, enabling distributed nodes to

effectively reach consensus on the validity of block data in a decen-

tralized blockchain network. The consensus mechanism is designed to

keep consistency among all the nodes. It determines who will submit

blocks in the Blockchain system [24]. The incentive layer combines

economic factors, mainly including the issue and distribution mecha-

nism of economic incentives. In public Blockchains, the incentive

mechanism encourages compliance with rules and participation in

bookkeeping, and to punish violation, making the entire system evolving

in a virtuous circle. In permissioned Blockchains, there is no need to

encourage nodes to compete for bookkeeping, therefore, the incentive

mechanism does not necessarily exist [25]. The contract layer mainly

encapsulates various codes, algorithms and smart contracts, which is the

basis of the programmability of the Blockchain [26]. The smart contract

Fig. 2. The number of publications in recent four years in manufacturing, supply chain, and industrial blockchain.

Z. Li et al.