Proof of service power: A blockchain consensus for cloud manufacturing

Abstract With the gradual promotion and in-depth application of cloud manufacturing platform, some deep-seated problems restricting enterprises to go to the cloud are gradually exposed. Lack of trust and security of cloud manufacturing platforms are the bottleneck problems. How to ensure the credit of both trading sides and reduce the transaction risk and transaction cost are still urgent problems to be solved. In recent years, with the continuous development and maturity of blockchain technology, it has attracted widespread attention in the manufacturing field. Its characteristics of trustlessness, anti-tampering, traceability, and high transparency provide new ideas for the development of cloud manufacturing platforms and solving the above problems. However, the traditional consensus protocol has problems such as token dependence and high energy consumption, which is not suitable for the special scenario of cloud manufacturing with a large number of big deals. This paper proposes a blockchain consensus protocol of “Proof of Service Power” (PoSP) for application scenarios of cloud manufacturing. The consensus mechanism uses historical transaction information accumulated by member nodes in a cloud manufacturing system to calculate the service power of member nodes, which greatly reduces energy consumption in the Proof of Work (PoW) process. An introduction of the credit incentive mechanism makes PoSP consensus protocol get rid of token dependence while providing a quantitative basis for trust evaluation for each participant in the cloud manufacturing system. The experimental results show that the consensus mechanism for proof of service power has a good incentive effect, and it has lower energy consumption and higher transaction per second (TPS) than the proof of work and proof of stake (PoS). This study provides new ideas and a reference pattern for the application of blockchain technology in cloud manufacturing platform.