ManuChain II: Blockchained Smart Contract System as the Digital Twin of Decentralized Autonomous Manufacturing Toward Resilience in Industry 5.0

Abstract

In Industry 5.0 vision, machines are empowered with the interaction capability to autonomously make local decisions and coordinate with each other as well as humans. However, how to form a group consensus on the rapid self-organizing of the manufacturing process is critical for achieving manufacturing resilience under disturbances and disruptions. Based on our formerly developed system ManuChain (Leng et al., 2020), this article proposes a blockchained smart contract system (BSCS), named ManuChain II, as the digital twin of a decentralized autonomous manufacturing system for achieving resilience in Industry 5.0. A blockchain-secured multiagent system architecture together with a product data model is established to form the BSCS. The BSCS could prevent tampering with data and enhance the transparency of the product manufacturing process. In BSCS, two types of blockchained smart contracts (SCs) are established with a bi-level interplay computing architecture. The lower-level contracts perform the predefined and learned patterns of task coordination for achieving resilience under internal disruptions. The upper-level contracts are incorporated with communication-efficient decentralized deep-learning algorithms for the learning, updating, transferring, and sharing of coordination patterns used in the autonomous decision in lower-level SCs, thereby achieving the continuous improvement of the system’s decentralized autonomous intelligence. Via incorporating the decentralized deep learning algorithms into blockchained SCs, this study reveals a new way to realize the self-organizing intelligence of the manufacturing system for enhancing resilience toward Industry 5.0.