Technical challenges of blockchain technology for sustainable manufacturing paradigm in Industry 4.0 era using a fuzzy decision support system

Since 2008, many academics have increasingly paid attention to blockchain technology from different perspectives. In general, researchers desire to achieve global blockchain systems within a sustainable manufacturing domain; however, a number of technical challenges have come to exist in the recent decade, for instance, consensus algorithms and computing paradigms that can meet the privacy protection requirements of manufacturing systems. Therefore, an integrated decision-making framework called Pythagorean fuzzy-entropy-rank sum-Combined Compromise Solution (PF-entropy-RS-CoCoSo) is developed in this study, including two main phases. In the first phase, the PF-entropy-RS method is applied to obtain the subjective and objective weights of criteria to evaluate the technical challenges of transforming blockchain technology for a sustainable manufacturing paradigm in the Industry 4.0 era. The PF-CoCoSo model is then utilized in the second phase to assess the preferences of organizations over different technical challenges of the blockchain technology transformation for the sustainable manufacturing paradigm in the Industry 4.0 era. An empirical case study is taken to assess the main technical challenges of blockchain technology transformation for the sustainable manufacturing paradigm. Furthermore, a comparison analysis and a sensitivity investigation are made to demonstrate the superiority of the developed framework. © 2023 Elsevier Inc.