A blockchain technology based trust system for cloud manufacturing

Cloud manufacturing (CM) is a new networked manufacturing model that delivers various on-demand manufacturing capabilities to the consumers from the providers. In this model, the provider and consumer never meet each other, thus "trust" is the major enabler for starting a collaboration. In another word, a user must be sure that the requested capability will not be provided with malicious results, and the provider should ensure that the payment will be made on time. In this paper, a novel Blockchain Technology (BCT)-based trust system called "Blocktrust" is proposed to address the trust problem of the CM. First, the CM framework that contains the digital firm, capability pool, and digital certificate issuing units is developed, and then, the private blocktrust peer-to-peer network is proposed and implemented based on Hyperledger fabric. Finlay, the feasibility of the blocktrust is examined under different testing scenarios. The reason for using a private network instead of the public is placing restrictions on who is allowed to participate in the network and also enjoying a network with fast transaction speed. Experiments show that the proposed blocktrust embedded CM is credible and practical.