A synergistic cloud-fog-blockchain architecture for smart manufacturing

Smart manufacturing in Industry 4.0 is heading towards a social cyber-physical production system (SCPPS), which leads to challenges of big data lifecycle management, dynamic IoTs resource allocation, and secure decentralized collaboration. To overcome these, firstly, a big-data-driven cloud-fog architecture was proposed for distributed computing resource configuration. Then, key blockchain technologies—consensus mechanisms, security protocols, and smart contracts—was integrated to improve distributed data management. A Cloud-Fog-Blockchain (CFB) architecture was proposed enables dynamic resource orchestration while ensuring data integrity and trusted collaboration across manufacturing networks. The CFB architecture provides unified countermeasures: it streamlines industrial data workflows, supports massive IoTs deployments via fog-layer processing, and establishes secure social manufacturing collaboration through blockchain traceability. A manufacturing supply chain simulation was conducted, which demonstrated that the CFB architecture outperformed other architectures in terms of the overall network performance, scalability, security and privacy preservation.