Open Access

Ensuring data quality is central to the digital transformation in industry. Business processes such as predictive maintenance or condition monitoring can be implemented or improved based on the available data. In order to guarantee high data quality, a single data validation system are usually used to validate the production data for further use. However, using a single system allows an attacker only to perform one successful attack to corrupt the whole system. We present a new approach in which a data validation system using multiple different validators minimizes the probability of success for the attacker. The validators are arranged in clusters based on their properties. For a validation process, a challenge is given that specifies which validators should perform the current validation. Validation results from other validators are dropped. This ensures that even for more than half of the validators being corrupted anomalies can be detected during the validation process.

The digital transformation of companies is expected to increase the digital interconnection between different companies to develop optimized, customized, hybrid business models. These cross-company business models require secure, reliable, and traceable logging and monitoring of contractually agreed information sharing between machine tools, operators, and service providers. This paper discusses how the major requirements for building hybrid business models can be tackled by the blockchain for building a chain of trust and smart contracts for digitized contracts. A machine maintenance use case is used to discuss the readiness of smart contracts for the automation of workflows defined in contracts. Furthermore, it is shown that the number of failures is significantly improved by using these contracts and a blockchain.