Integrating the IoT and Blockchain Technology for the Next Generation of Mining Inspection Systems

Inspection of mining assets is a crucial part of the maintenance process and is of interest to several stakeholders (e.g., OEMs, owners, users, and inspectors). Inspections require an inspector to verify several characteristics of the assets onsite, typically using legacy and poorly digitized procedures. Thus, many research opportunities arise from the adoption of digital technologies to make these procedures more efficient, reliable, and straightforward. In addition to cloud computing, the ubiquitous presence of modern mobile devices, new measurement tools with embedded connectivity capabilities, and blockchain technologies could greatly improve trust and transparency between the stakeholders interested in the inspection. However, there has been little discussion on integrating these technologies into the mining domain. This paper presents and evaluates an end-to-end system to conduct inspections using mobile devices that directly interact with constrained IoT sensor devices. Furthermore, our proposal provides a method to integrate constrained IoT devices as smart measuring tools that directly interact with a blockchain system, guaranteeing data integrity and increasing the trustworthiness of the data. Finally, we highlight the benefits of our proposed architecture by evaluating a real case study in a mining inspection scenario.