Blockchain-based ubiquitous manufacturing: a secure and reliable cyber-physical system

With product customisation and emerging business opportunities, small and medium manufacturing enterprises (SMEs) must find ways to collaborate and share competency in a trustable manner to survive a turbulent market. Therefore, service industry turns to the manufacturing industry and SMEs migrate to cloud manufacturing (CM) and ubiquitous manufacturing. However, existing platforms use centralised networking, which suffers from security, scalability and big-data problems. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based platform as a trustable network to eradicate third-party problems, which can improve the scalability, security and big-data problems for SMEs. Our proposed platform is developed based on a consortium blockchain which provides a peer-to-peer communication network between the end user and the service provider. We improve existing consensus mechanism and communication protocol based on a cyber-physical system (CPS), via an autonomous agent. Firstly, we provide a review of cloud manufacturing, ubiquitous manufacturing and blockchain-based manufacturing approaches by highlighting the main problems. Then, the proposed platform, blockchain ubiquitous manufacturing (BCUM), is explained, based on its architecture, consensus algorithm and CPS, with the help of autonomous agent communication. The proposed platform has been developed for 3D printing companies which are geographically distributed and tested based on network performance and three practical scenarios.