Consensus-oriented cloud manufacturing based on blockchain technology: An exploratory study

Abstract

In the era of cloud computing and Industry 4.0, significant research efforts on cloud manufacturing have been witnessed in recent years. Nevertheless, challenges, such as issues of trust, safety, payment, remain in this emerging area, which cause less confidence for industry to adopt cloud manufacturing. In this regard, the recent development of blockchain technology provides a potential viable solution thanks to its unique advantages in decentralization and security. As such, we propose a new framework of cloud manufacturing by integrating the blockchain technology. In essence, consensus-oriented mechanisms are employed to generate the operating standards for the blockchain cloud manufacturing model. Moreover, based on the open source Ethereum code, we construct a simulation case study for 3D printing services using the proposed framework. A consortium or federated blockchain is simulated which uses Proof-of-Authority (PoA) as the consensus algorithm of block generation. The simulation involves 939 job requests from 100 users, as well as 10 service providers. The k-nearest neighbors (KNN) algorithm is employed to recommend the service provider for each request. The results show that the provider’s score of service evaluation tends to be stabilize, and 934 requests for service are successfully fulfilled by the appropriate providers while the remaining 5 requests fail to be serviced.