XManuChain: A Permissioned Blockchain Framework for Securing IoP Transactions in Production Process Collaboration

Smart manufacturing increasingly depends on cross-factory data exchange among Internet of Production (IoP) devices and organizational actors. Conventional cloud-centric coordination simplifies storage and analytics, but it leaves collaborative workflows exposed to latency, centralized failure modes, and cross-organizational access-control challenges. This article presents XManuChain, a permissioned-blockchain framework for securing IoP transactions in collaborative production processes. The framework combines a permissioned ledger with edge and cloud services and distinguishes three operational scopes: local (within one factory), inter-local (across factories of the same organization), and cross-domain (across organizations). The principal contribution is not the isolated use of blockchain, edge computing, or cloud computing, but their integration into a hierarchical agent-based transaction model together with a blockchain-backed authentication scheme for user devices, local agents, external agents, and cross-domain agents. A prototype implementation in a Hyperledger Composer/Playground environment is used to validate transaction logic and ledger state transitions, while BAN logic and AVISPA are used to examine authentication properties. The reported results indicate functional feasibility for the modeled local, inter-local, and cross-domain workflows. Because the present evaluation is conducted in a browser-based, resource-constrained prototype environment and the manuscript does not yet provide a full distributed deployment specification, the performance findings should be interpreted as preliminary rather than as definitive production-scale measurements.