A novel multi-objective service composition architecture for blockchain-based cloud manufacturing


 In recent years, many core technologies of Industry 4.0 have advanced significantly, particularly the integration of big data technology and cloud manufacturing (CMfg). The decentralization and traceability features of blockchain technology (BCT) provide an effective solution to provide trusted resource service in CMfg. Service composition is a core issue of CMfg to increase the value of digital assets. However, existing research on service composition based on BCT suffers from both the blockchain proof-of-work (POW) mechanism and the service composition problem need to consume large computational overheads, as well as the blockchain fork problem affecting the system's reliability, which reduces the usefulness of these schemes. To solve these problems, this paper proposes a novel multi-objective service composition architecture for blockchain-based CMfg (MOSC-BBCM). In MOSC-BBCM, first, a blockchain-chained storage structure is designed for the actual manufacturing cloud service constraint and scale dynamic changes, which can fully use the historical service information and accelerate the search for high-quality solutions. Second, to reduce the squandered computing resources in the POW, a mining mechanism based on multi-objective service composition and optimal selection is proposed, where miners competitively solve a nondeterminate polynomial (NP)-hard problem to replace the mathematical puzzle. Finally, an incentive mechanism based on the environment selection method is proposed, which can avoid the fork problem while distributing on a labor basis. The effectiveness of the proposed MOSC-BBCM is verified in simulated numerical experiments of CMfg, which shows that the architecture provides a flexible and configurable scheme for blockchain-based CMfg with high availability.