A novel cloud manufacturing service composition platform enabled by Blockchain technology

Abstract

In the near future, manufacturing industries will be mostly recognised with characteristics like IoT, and massive data transactions. To fulfil these characteristics, paradigms like Cloud manufacturing, Industry 4.0 and smart factory have passed their preliminary steps to become the primary inspirations. Considering the nature of Cloud manufacturing which consists of a vast number of service providers and Service demanders being introduced to the manufacturing cloud, service composition problem is introduced. However, there is a big challenge for fulfilling the dynamic behaviour of parameters which change rapidly over time in the service composition problem. This paper challenges the centralised mechanism of service composition problem and introduces a novel platform entitled Blockchain-based service composition model (Block-SC) based on the Blockchain technology. Block-SC as a novel manufacturing architecture conquers the centralised mechanism by dividing the original service composition problem into multiple sub-problems each of which contains a small fraction of the service/task pool. The capabilities of the proposed platform are remarkable from two perspectives; first, it provides an effective mechanism for collaboration of service composition service providers with a service-oriented approach and from the second perspective, the optimality of service composition problem is profoundly affected considering the dynamic behaviour of Cloud manufacturing.