Titulo Estágio
Biographies of things using blockchain
Áreas de especialidade
Comunicações, Serviços e Infraestruturas
Sistemas de Informação
Local do Estágio
DEI-FCTUC
Enquadramento
The biography of a product consists on a log of the product story along its all life. This log may contain data such as production story, working statistics, availability history, number and time of failures. As the Internet of Things (IoT) is finally becoming a reality, the number of devices connected is growing at a fast rate, enabling a growing number of applications, some of them requiring some sort of logging. A thing can be anything from a refrigerator to a highly specific health device, including different types of sensor and actuator devices, which communicate between them using the Internet, each with specific needs and hardware limitations. Many of these things also have the need to maintain an immutable ledger, i.e., a history record that cannot be changed and that can be audited. This working record may help companies to control their products warranties, to understand the reasons of malfunctions, and to give users the confidence that a specific thing has gone through a specific set of steps or that it comes from where it says. One way of creating immutable ledgers is to use blockchain.
In this work the student will research the application of blockchain technologies to provide the biography of things in an IoT environment. To accomplish this goal the specific limitations of the IoT devices and their communication capabilities must be taken into account. The aim is to create a generic platform that can be used by a generic thing to log its history in a secure and immutable way, exploring the best capabilities of IoT networks and blockchain technologies.
Objetivo
The work to be done under this proposal has two main objectives:
- Study of the application of blockchain as a support technology to enable the biography of things;
- Development of a generic platform prototype to support the biography of things in an IoT environment, using blockchain.
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 1
1) Study of the state-of-the-art of product biographies, software versioning and tracing.
2) Study of blockchain and supporting tools.
3) Design of a generic platform to support the biography of things using blockchain
Work results of the 1st semester:
• Initial design of a generic platform to support biographies of things using blockchain.
• Intermediate report
Plano de Trabalhos - Semestre 2
4) Development of a working prototype of a generic biography of things platform using blockchain.
5) Tests and validation
6) Writing of the final report
Work results of the 2nd semester:
• Generic biography of things supporting platform.
• Final report
Condições
The work will be developed at CISUC and will be supervised by a professor of the Information Systems group and other from the Laboratory of Communications and Telematics.
This work proposal is presented together with Celulose Beira Industrial (CELBI) SA, an enterprise primarily engaged in the production and trade of short fibre paper pulp of high quality, from eucalyptus, and in the production of electricity (cogeneration).
Observações
Occasional visits to CELBI based in Leirosa, 15km south of Figueira da Foz, may be required.
Orientador
Vasco Nuno Sousa Simões Pereira e João Nuno Lopes Barata
vasco@dei.uc.pt 📩