Digital Thread for Smart Products: A Survey on Technologies, Challenges, and Opportunities in Service-Oriented Supply Chains

In Smart Manufacturing, the recent opportunities provided by the Information and Communication Technologies have paved the way to a seamless connection of the manufactured product throughout its entire lifecycle, leading to the diffusion of the concepts of Smart Product and Digital Thread, which leverage digital technologies to assure a continuous flow of data encompassing the design phase of a product, manufacturing, operation, maintenance and also its eventual disposal or recycling. This compelling need to obtain a unified view of information associated with Smart Products has stimulated the so-called Internet of Services (IoS) paradigm, allowing for the sharing of products data and the execution of functions among various participants in intertwined supply chains. In these contexts, service-oriented architectures are being more and more employed to meet the complex and ever-evolving data analysis requirements, particularly when implementing Digital Thread solutions for Smart Products, where several issues must be considered, ranging from the heterogeneity of (Big) data to data sovereignty and data access policies, as information may cross the borders of multiple actors participating in intertwined supply chains. This survey discusses about the technological solutions and challenges to implement Digital Threads for Smart Products in Smart Manufacturing contexts, providing insights on opportunities for future research directions. In addition, the survey proposes a comprehensive multi-tier service-oriented architectural model to jointly tackle (Big) data heterogeneity, data sovereignty and data access policies issues, as they are only partially addressed by the research efforts examined in the literature review.