Blockchain-Based Cloud Manufacturing: Decentralization
This addresses issues for manufacturing researchers and practitioners by proposing a decentralized solution, but it appears incremental as it applies existing blockchain technology to a known bottleneck in cloud manufacturing.
The paper tackles problems of flexibility, efficiency, availability, and security in centralized cloud manufacturing by introducing a decentralized network architecture based on blockchain technology, aiming to provide a peer-to-peer network for multiple providers.
Recently, there has been growing interest in the field of cloud manufacturing (CM) amongst researchers in the manufacturing community. Cloud manufacturing is a customer-driven manufacturing model that was inspired by cloud computing, and its major objective was to provide ubiquitous on-demand access to services. However, the current CM architecture suffers from problems that are associated with a centralized based industrial network framework and third part operation. In a nutshell, centralized networking has had issues with flexibility, efficiency, availability, and security. Therefore, this paper aims to tackle these problems by introducing an ongoing project to a decentralized network architecture for cloud manufacturing which is based on the blockchain technology. In essence, this research paper introduces the blockchain technology as a decentralized peer to peer network for multiple cloud manufacturing providers.