Blockchain Models for Cyber-Credits of Social Manufacturing

Abstract

The increasing of personalized demands requires manufacturing industry to own high flexibility and rapid response to market. In this situation, a social manufacturing network (SMN) is formed with distributed socialized manufacturing resources (SMRs) to provide more precise and professional service for customers. SMN is a decentralized network in which the credibility and responsibility of cross-enterprise production activities are difficult to ensure, because there are no trusted third parties to supervise them. For solving this problem, a manufacturing cyber-credits for SMN that applies the decentralized blockchain technology is put forward to regulate production activities of SMRs. The concept and framework of the proposed mechanism are firstly given. Then, several key enabling technologies are discussed to support the implementation of the mechanism. It is expected that the manufacturing cyber-credits could provide a possible way to normalize and regulate cross-enterprise production activities under social manufacturing paradigm.