A novel service level agreement model using blockchain and smart contract for cloud manufacturing in industry 4.0

ABSTRACT

The number of service offerings in cloud manufacturing continues to grow, so that service level agreement (SLA) within cloud manufacturing is increasingly used to ensure the coordination of the cross-organisational business processes between the cloud service providers (CSP) and cloud service consumers (CSC). The definition of SLA and monitoring SLA’s performance are significant and should be highly valued to ensure the effectiveness and efficiency of business services. At present, the third-party monitoring methods based on service credit are mainly applied in cloud manufacturing environments. There is no effective supervision mechanism to monitor the third party and no efficient punishment mechanism on SLA violation. To address aforementioned issues, this paper proposes a novel Service Level Agreement model by integrating Blockchain and Smart Contract (SLABSC), in which trust issues among CSP, CSC, and the third-party monitoring can be addressed through Blockchain technologies. The method proposed in this paper realises the full functionality of SLABSC and facilitates data security, and it can be used to supervise CSP to provide better services. Experiments results show that the performance of the proposed model is valid and efficient.

KEYWORDS:

• Blockchain
• smart contract
• service level agreement
• blockchain as a service
• cloud computing

Acknowledgments

The paper is supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant (No. 61672022 and No. U1904186), Key Disciplines of Computer Science and Technology of Shanghai Polytechnic University under Grant No. XXKZD1604.

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the the National Natural Science Foundation of China [No. 61672022 and No. U1904186].