Blockchains and Internet of Things for the Pooling of Warehouse Resources

Abstract

Aims: The purpose of this research paper is the study of the applicability of Blockchain technology and Smart Contracts to manage, control and secure an industrial Internet of Things network (IoT) for pooled warehouses with multiple actors and activities (not only restricted to transport and storage as currently developed in enterprises). Problem: IoT technology enables things to connect and exchange data, resulting in efficiency improvements, economic benefits, reduced human intervention and enabled interactions (information exchange and analysis) between human/machine to machine. However, the main difficulties lie in the definition of a robust global mechanism to secure the IoT, the awareness of resources diversity (heterogeneity of devices), and physical management of IoT. This article will attempt to answer these questionings. Results: To respond to these questions, we propose a hybrid architecture based on blockchains and multi-agents system to secure an industrial IoT corresponding to a pooled warehouse system. The proposed hybrid architecture completely represents our system, with all actors and connected objects in the pooled warehouse strategy. It is composed by two parts: a centralized part based on the multi-agents system to represent dynamic evolutions of actors’ behavior and a decentralized part, which corresponds to our block chain and smart contracts network to dynamically connect actors’ agents to pooled resources. The multi-agent system is coupled with game theory (cooperative game) to have a good systemic representation of our pooled warehouse management problem.