A Trustworthy Safety Inspection Framework Using Performance-Security Balanced Blockchain

Regular safety inspection is critical to reduce safety risk in industry. Applying consortium blockchain technology to safety inspection can ensure the effectiveness of inspection process and tracing of problems. However, there are two major issues when using conventional consortium blockchain. It is challenging to guarantee the authenticity of the retrieved data source, and meanwhile, achieving a balance between performance and security is not easy. Hence, this paper proposes a blockchain based performance-security balanced safety inspection framework (PSB-SIF), in which a safety inspection box is designed to ensure the authenticity of the inspector’s identity while inspection logic is executed automatically via smart contracts. In addition, this paper also proposes a novel credit scoring based Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) consensus algorithm, named Safety Inspection Byzantine Fault Tolerance consensus algorithm (SIBFT), which is used to balance the performance and security of consensus network in safety inspection. We evaluate the proposed approach by comparing with the solutions using RAFT, Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT), and SIBFT consensus algorithms in terms of throughput, transaction latency, scalability and security of PSB-SIF. The evaluation results show that PSB-SIF is efficient for all these quality metrics.