Pubblicazioni

In the last years, the servitization is emerging as a new business model in the manufacturing sector, pushed by its promises of allowing to pay machines based on their actual use. Servitization is based on the recording of important events related to machine usage, such as the type and time of used tools and the type of materials processed. However, actors involved in the servitization should either trust one each other or rely on a third-party authority to store machine usage statistics in a secure and non-repudiable manner. The paper presents a novel solution adopting Blockchain in the ice cream market to leverage the servitization of ice cream machines, involving machine manufacturers, ice cream refill producers, and ice cream makers. The proposed solution exploits the amount of used refills as the metric of machine usage and ensures that involved actors are aware of every refill procedure. In addition, it ensures the privacy of business-relevant information, e.g., by avoiding that two refill producers are reciprocally aware of the amount of sold refills. While targeting the ice cream supply chain, our solution may represent a reference model for servitization even for other market sectors. Finally, performance results based on a working prototype demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed solution even on resource constrained devices.

In modern society, food safety is becoming more and more important. The adoption of appropriate practices, such as the ones defined in the HACCP system, during food production, handling, preparation, and storage can reasonably guarantee food safety. However, it is not easy to apply HACCP methodologies in an automatic form, thus hindering its use in industrial machines. To solve this problem, the paper presents a novel solution adopting Internet of Things (IoT) and Blockchain technologies in the ice cream production process to automate the enforcement of HACCP directives. The new Carpigiani ice cream making machines exploit IoT for the automation of data gathering (in particular the temperature, that is of particular concern for dairy products) and a Blockchain solution for a tamper-proof and non-repudiable distributed storage of HACCP sensitive production data.