PenChain: A Blockchain-Based Platform for Penalty-Aware Service Provisioning

Abstract

Service provisioning is of paramount importance as we are now heading for a world of integrated services giving rise to the next generation of service ecosystems. The huge number of service offerings that will be available for customers in future scenarios require a novel approach to service registry and discovery that lets customers choose those offerings that best match their preferences. One way to achieve this is to introduce the provider’s reputation, i.e., a quality indicator of the provisioned service, as an additional search criterion. Now, with blockchain technology in our hands, automated regulation of service-level agreements (SLAs) that capture the mutual agreements between all involved parties has regained momentum. In this article, we report our full-fledged work on the conception, design, and construction of a platform for SLA-minded service provisioning called PenChain. With our work, we demonstrate that penalty-aware SLAs of general services – if represented in a machine-readable logic and assisted by distributed ledger technology – are programmatically enforceable. We devise algorithms for ranking services in a search result taking into account the digitized values of the SLAs. We offer scenario-based evaluation of PenChain in the field of precision agriculture and the domain of automotive manufacturing. Furthermore, we examine the scalability and the data security of PenChain for precision agriculture.