Design of Crowdsourcing Supply Chain Platform Based on Ontology and Blockchain

ABSTRACT As a new type of supply chain (SC) based on “Internet plus Innovation”, crowdsourcing supply chain (CSC) emphasizes mass participation and personalized demands more than traditional SC. Most of the current CSC systems are based on a centralized structure. With the development of crowdsourcing business, problems such as single point of failure, malicious data leakage or fairness are prone to occur. Deploying the CSC system onto the decentralized blockchain can solve the above problems to a certain extent. However, deploying CSC applications on the blockchain is facing issues like service matching efficiency and new security concerns. In this paper, a novel CSC platform is proposed based on ontology and blockchain. The matching of tasks and candidate workers is automatically achieved by designing some ontologies and semantic web rule language (SWRL) rules. The quality of the submitted solutions can be effectively evaluated by the proposed improved confidence‐weighted voting algorithm and semi‐monopoly dividend algorithm. To better ensure data confidentiality and identity anonymity, a task‐matching privacy protection algorithm combining ontology with proxy re‐encryption bilinear pairing technology is proposed. Finally, a software prototype is implemented on the Ethereum public test network by using the CSC dataset. The experimental results show that the time cost of the proposed scheme is within an acceptable range, while the gas consumption is saved by approximately 15%–25%.