Distributed Systems @ UniFE

The project was carried out in collaboration and at the request of the Carpigiani company to solve the problem of lack of trust between the actors involved in the ice cream machine servitization context.

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. 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 project is based on 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 project sees the use of Blockchain technologies integrated on Carpigiani ice cream machines that are technologically advanced devices, equipped with a smart management solution allowing remote monitoring and control. The realized 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.

We realized a low energy consumption permissioned Blockchain, where the transaction endorsement policy is based on the awareness of every involved organization, and the creation of new transactions is regulated by smart contracts. In this manner every organization involved in transactions can not later repudiate information related to a refill procedure. In addition, the use of smart contracts can simplifies the validation and correctness of transactions entered in the blockchain, such as verifying that an ice cream maker uses only certified and not-expired refills.