Industry 4.0 is currently transforming the industrial landscape through the use of innovative technologies and novel data management approaches. The incorporation of Industry 4.0 brought new dimensions of improvement and autonomy into the existing industrial manufacturing processes which has also led to increased expectations for traceability in manufacturing. Traceability enables the tracking of every part and product of the manufacturing process giving insights into each manufactured component and its full history across each operation step that helps manufacturers improve quality and efficiency. Despite the huge potential in facilitating the optimization of the production lines, product traceability has remained a challenging topic in mass manufacturing. Hence, in this paper, an innovative Blockchain-based framework is proposed to integrate the processes of a real production line using the Industry 4.0 Festo Cyber-Physical Factory located at London Digital Twin Research Centre, Middlesex University. Blockchain technology is a distributed and shared database of events for a product life cycle that is encrypted in blocks or smaller data units. This paper introduces a viable blockchain-based framework implemented within a real smart product assembly for internal traceability within the production process in order to improve the security by preventing counterfeiting, identify specific problems on the production lin
