Evolutionary game-based incentive models for sustainable trust enhancement in a blockchained shared manufacturing network

Abstract

Shared manufacturing (SM) is an advanced manufacturing mode to solve the problems of information asymmetry and resource imbalance in the complex supply and demand relationship under the background of mass personalization. Blockchain can provide technical solutions for trust issues between manufacturing service providers and demanders, but less research has focused on the stable maintenance of a blockchained shared manufacturing network (BSMN). Industrial knowledge graph and cognitive intelligence play an important role in designing incentive mechanisms for BSMN. Based on the evolutionary game theory, this paper designs various incentive models and develops the corresponding smart contracts to encourage different enterprises to participate in the “accounting” operations, to enhance the trust and maintain the operational stability of BSMN. Firstly, the evolution mechanism of BSMN was analyzed. Then, an evolutionary game model between shared manufacturing enterprise nodes was established to deduce the stable state of BSMN. Based on the analysis of the evolutionarily stable state, an incentive model with three strategies to encourage different enterprise nodes to participate in “accounting” operations was determined, and smart contracts of the incentive models were developed. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed incentive models was verified by simulation experiments.