Abstract
Smart manufacturing is the core of the modern production and manufacturing industry as it moves towards digitalization. The successful implementation of smart manufacturing needs the support of information technology, data technology, and operational technology, among which edge computing, blockchain technology and artificial intelligence can play significant roles facilitating the development of smart manufacturing. In this research, a smart manufacturing system is proposed considering the integration of edge computing and blockchain technology. The introduction of edge computing can balance the computational workload and provide a more timely response for terminal devices. Blockchain technology can be utilized to promote both the device-level data transmission and the manufacturing service transaction. Moreover, regarding the computational task assignment in smart manufacturing systems, a mathematical model is proposed, and further solved using a swarm intelligence-based approach. Numerical experiments show that the introduction of the edge computing mechanism in smart manufacturing can significantly improve the processing time, especially with a large number of tasks.
Highlights
The evolution of industrialization has changed from automation to digitalization
Smart manufacturing is a promising future trend for the development of the production and manufacturing industry, which is the core of the new industrialization
The implementation of smart manufacturing needs the holistic support of information technology, data technology, and operational technology, among which the development of edge computing and blockchain technology based on the industrial internet can substantially facilitate the operational process of smart manufacturing
Summary
The evolution of industrialization has changed from automation to digitalization. Ever since the introduction of Industry 4.0 in Germany, various similar concepts or projects have been initiated in different countries or regions, such as the Industrial Internet from the US, Made in China 2025, Industry 4.1J from Japan, and Manufacturing Industry Innovation 3.0 from South Korea. With the application of MEC, the architecture of smart manufacturing is changed from centralized management to a distributed form, which leads to a task assignment problem from terminal devices [5] and the corresponding computing resource allocation problem among the edge servers [6]. SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE The incorporation of edge computing and blockchain technology can substantially facilitate data processing and data transaction in smart manufacturing systems, which are elaborated in the following subsections. The introduction of edge servers and IIoT changes the manufacturing paradigm from a cloud-centered mode to a distributed system architecture Under these circumstances, blockchain technology can be used to strengthen the data integrity and reduce the data transmission risks by enabling the identification, sharing and validation of key relevant data in a distributed manner. The above operational procedures of the transaction blockchain constitute smart contracts among multiple interactive business partners, of which the inner protocols can facilitate, verify, and enforce the performance or negotiation of a contract
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