Blockchain

Distributed ledger technology for secure supply chain tracking. This term is essential for understanding industry 4 in industrial automation and PLC programming.

Blockchain is part of the digital-transformation vocabulary that has become unavoidable in modern automation projects. Distributed ledger technology for secure supply chain tracking.

Adopting Blockchain usually requires either an architectural shift in how plant data is collected, transformed, and consumed, or — more commonly — incremental layering on top of existing automation, using gateways, brokers, and reference architectures like the Purdue Model.

For engineers approaching Blockchain from a traditional PLC background, the steepest part of the learning curve is usually the IT-side of the stack — networking, identity, brokers, cloud — not the automation side, which they already know.