Abstract
1. Introduction
2. Literature review
3. Makerchain model for decentralized social manufacturing
4. Chemical signature and consensus algorithm for anti-counterfeiting
5. Smart contract tree for self-organizing process in makerchain
6. An example of decentralized application
7. Conclusions
Declaration of conflicting interests
Acknowledgments
References
Abstract
The growth of personalized demands requires socialized resources to timely self-organize themselves with crowd intelligence for co-creating open architecture products. This social manufacturing paradigm drives an increased demand for makers to track the authenticity and quality of products. A new decentralized blockchain-driven model, named Makerchain, is presented to handle the cyber-credit of social manufacturing among various makers. An anti-counterfeiting method composed of chemical signature is proposed to represent unique features of personalized products. Twinning unique signature data to blockchain and other functional databases is realized and anticipated to make manufacturing service transactions among makers more trustworthy. Based on an automated execution mechanism of smart contracts among makers, a decentralized manufacturing network can be enabled for automating transactions among makers, as well as third-party verification of product lifecycle through a trail of historic events. A Makerchain Decentralized Application (DApp) is presented to demonstrate the proposed approach through which clustered makers can self-organizing themselves around personalized demands.
Introduction
The rapid development of cheap small-size rapid prototyping tools such as 3D printers has made product development more open and socialized. The decentralized collaborative manufacturing of open architecture products is of great significance for improving of products as well as meeting massive personalized demands (Koren et al., 2013). Various social manufacturing networks composed of makers and prosumers are emerging, which greatly brings challenge to traditional large manufacturers previously in a dominant position (Jiang et al., 2016). Social manufacturing could offer system-level changes by activating and empowering the end consumers to become value creators, while forming considerable innovative sustainable outcomes in design and manufacturing (Hirscher et al., 2018; Hamalainen et al., 2018). It is a novel decentralized collaborative paradigm rather than a hierarchical and top-down cooperating structure. Ensuring trust among makers in a social manufacturing paradigm is challenging, since multiple distributed makers are involved in the design, manufacturing, and assemblies of product (Hamalainen et al., 2018). Conventionally, trust in a manufacturing community is formed via extensive contract bargain and negotiation, acknowledgement of historic credit report, and periodic financial audits. Traditional methods in establishing trust will hinder the economic feasibility of social manufacturing paradigm. The costs of securing trust among all makers is significant. Moreover, although the open architecture-type of products can guarantee the industry standards and interfaces in a social manufacturing paradigm, it is still difficult to obtain an effective interconnection among makers due to the lack of decision-supporting mechanism to form consensus.