Renault Rolls Out Blockchain-Based System For Auto Industry Compliance

Carmaker Renault Group said it has developed a blockchain-based system allowing manufacturers to certify the regulatory compliance of vehicle components from design through to production.

The XCEED (eXtended Compliance End-to-End Distributed) project was developed in response to new regulations that came into force on 1 September placing additional regulatory controls on the car industry and its supply chain.

The “market surveillance” regulations were largely developed in response to the VW diesel scandal, which involved onboard computers being engineered to conceal vehicles’ real nitrogen-oxide emissions when they detected that tests were being run.

Hyperledger Fabric

Renault said its new system is based on the Hyperledger Fabric blockchain technology and was deployed in collaboration with IBM.

The system establishes an independent ledger that tracks and certifies the regulatory compliance of vehicle components and subcomponents.

The independent nature of blockchain technology allows information to be shared and tracked by several organisations, without any one of them controlling the system.

XCEED is intended to be used for sharing compliance information between parts manufacturers and vehicle makers.

Decentralised

The distributed system makes data available in real-time and is more efficient than a centralised system, Renault said.

The decentralised system allows each party to maintain data control and confidentiality, without compromising its integrity, according to Renault.

Renault has been developing XCEED since 2019 and worked with automotive industry partners including Continental, Faurecia, Plastic Omnium and Saint-Gobain.

In testing at Renault’s Douai plant the system has accumulated more than 1 million archived documents while running at a speed of 500 transactions per second.

Blockchain was first widely deployed to run the Bitcoin digital currency, but has since been applied to a wide variety of fields, notably including the financial sector.