Highly automated international and global collaboration of industrial production environments is a key feature of Industry 4.0 (I4.0). In various countries, local production facilities will be able to collaborate with each other in an ad-hoc and automated manner across continents. Therefore, availability of a comprehensive I4.0 ecosystem with a high-level of security integrated is an indispensable prerequisite. Trustworthiness in the context of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) value chain security is an integral part of it.

Supply chains of the connected industries that are part of the I4.0 security ecosystem, must implement trustworthy collaboration infrastructure. In order to achieve the stated target, partners must be identified, and their respective trust-relevant characteristics must be determined and exchanged. For example, procurement, a process to form buyer-supplier relationships, has been done between parent companies and their subsidiaries based on their traditional relationships. However, in recent years, the business case of procurement between companies that do not have long business histories, has been globally increasing regardless of the companies’ scale and geographical location.
The overall goal of the present collaboration work between RRI, Japan and PI4.0, Germany, is concentrated to the possibility of creating ad-hoc trustworthy relationships between companies, regardless of their business histories or their geographical locations. Therefore, in this whitepaper, the role of trustworthiness and mechanisms to assure trustworthiness between existing or potential business partners have been described.