A Quality Traceability Method for Electromagnetic Trip Devices Based on Blockchain and Petri Net

Abstract The traditional quality traceability methods for electromagnetic trip devices suffer from three major drawbacks. Firstly, there exist information silos among departments, resulting in low transparency. Secondly, node redundancy leads to a cumbersome process. Thirdly, the methods have inherent bottlenecks, causing delays in traceability. These drawbacks compromise the accuracy and timeliness of quality traceability for electromagnetic trip devices and expand the scope of harm caused by their quality and safety issues. To address these problems, this paper proposes a quality traceability method based on blockchain and Petri nets. First, the tamper-proof and decentralized characteristics of blockchain are utilized to resolve issues related to data credibility and transparency. Then, the Petri net employs an association matrix reorganization algorithm to divide the blockchain into subnets. If the same place has different transitions across multiple subnets, that place will become a target of competition, thus identifying the place and its corresponding transitions as conflict nodes. Next, a Petri-Markov chain for the blockchain subnets is constructed, and redundant nodes are identified by calculating the place occupancy rate and transition utilization rate. Finally, the conflicting and redundant nodes are optimized, and the new method is compared with the traditional quality traceability method through TINA software. In the scenario-based simulation, results show that compared with the traditional method, the new method improves traceability efficiency by 35.93% and reduces node delay time by 45.94%.