7650 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL INFORMATICS, VOL. 17, NO.
11, NOVEMBER 2021
A Sharding Scheme-Based Many-Objective
Optimization Algorithm for Enhancing Security in
Blockchain-Enabled Industrial Internet of Things
Xingjuan Cai , Shaojin Geng , Jingbo Zhang, Di Wu, Zhihua Cui , Wensheng Zhang,
and Jinjun Chen , Senior Member, IEEE
Abstract—While the industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)
can support efficient control of the physical world through
large amounts of industrial data, data security has been a
challenge due to various interconnections and accesses.
Blockchain technology can support security and privacy
preservation in IIoT data with its trusted and reliable secu-
rity mechanism. Sharding technology can help improve the
overall throughput and scalability of blockchain networks.
However, the effectiveness of sharding is still challenging
due to the uneven distribution of malicious nodes. By aim-
ing to improve the performance of blockchain networks
and reduce the possibility of malicious node aggrega-
tion, in this article, we propose a many-objective optimiza-
tion algorithm based on the dynamic reward and penalty
mechanism (MaOEA-DRP) to optimize the shard valida-
tion validity model. Then, an optimal blockchain sharding
scheme is obtained. Compared with other state-of-the-art
many-objective optimization algorithms, MaOEA-DRP per-
forms better on the DTLZ test suite. The simulation results
demonstrate that our proposed algorithm can significantly
improve the throughput and validity of sharding for better
security in the blockchain-enabled IIoT.
Index Terms—Blockchain, industrial Internet of Things
(IIoT), many-objective optimization algorithm, privacy
preservation, scalability, security.
I. INTRODUCTION
HE industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) [1] applies the
T Internet of Things technology to modern industrial sectors,
Manuscript received July 29, 2020; revised November 3, 2020; ac-
cepted December 27, 2020. Date of publication January 14, 2021; date
of current version July 26, 2021. Paper no. TII-20-3640. (Corresponding
Author: Zhihua Cui.)
Xingjuan Cai, Shaojin Geng, Jingbo Zhang, Di Wu, and Zhihua Cui
are with the School of Computer Science and Technology, Taiyuan
University of Science and Technology, Taiyuan 030024, China (e-mail:
xingjuancai@163.com; shaojin_geng@163.com; world4609@126.com;
wuxiaodou942@163.com; zhihua.cui@hotmail.com).
Wensheng Zhang is with the State Key Laboratory of Intelligent
Control and Management of Complex Systems, Institute of Automa-
tion, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100864, China (e-mail:
wensheng.zhang@ia.ac.cn).
Jinjun Chen is with the Computer Science and Software Engineer-
ing, Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, VIC 3122, Australia
(e-mail: jinjun.chen@gmail.com).
Color versions of one or more figures in this article are available at
https://doi.org/10.1109/TII.2021.3051607.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TII.2021.3051607
1551-3203 © 2021 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See https://www.ieee.org/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
including logistics, medical, manufacturing, and energy indus-
tries. It collects industrial data through various smart objects
to achieve troubleshooting, malicious behavior detection [2],
and other functions. For this reason, protecting the security and
privacy of large amounts of data is the most important issue
in IIoT. However, there are several challenges that must be
overcome before the formal adoption of IIoT across various
industrial sectors. Furthermore, as a kind of data security protec-
tion [3], blockchain technology [4] can effectively reduce data
system risks by enabling anonymous and trustful transactions
in a decentralized and trustless environment, which is slowly
changing the entire industrial field [5].
The term “blockchain” first appeared in a white paper on
bitcoin published by Nakamoto [6]. The blockchain is a col-
lection of stored data. Each block contains all the transaction
information and blocks information of the current network for
a period. Each block points to the previous block and these
blocks are chained together. The characteristics of distributed,
traceable, nontamperable, district centralization, and so on make
the blockchain technology widely used by different enterprises.
As an indispensable and vital part of the blockchain [7], there
are many consensus algorithms. The bitcoin blockchain uses
the proof of work (POW) mechanism [8], which is a scheme to
grab decision-making power through the workload. In addition,
the proof of stake mechanism [9] was developed to optimize
the problem of resource consumption in POW. The practical
byzantine fault-tolerant (PBFT) algorithm [10] is a solution to
the consensus of nodes in a network and is used to address the in-
efficiency of the original byzantine fault-tolerant algorithm. The
authors demonstrated that honest nodes can reach an agreement
on command in situations where the number of honest nodes is
larger than 3f and the number of malicious nodes is f or less,
that is, 3f + 1 ≥ n.
In order to satisfy the needs of modern business scenarios, the
scalability and transaction throughput of the blockchain [11] are
urgent problems to be addressed. The existing technologies are
generally divided into three categories: sidechain, sharding, and
directed acyclic graphs (DAGs). Sidechain technology [12] is
a cross-blockchain solution that achieves the transfer of digital
assets between two blockchains and improves the scalability of
the blockchain through fusion. The DAG [13] changes the data
structure of the blockchain. It replaces the original blockchain
CAI et al.: SHARDING SCHEME-BASED MANY-OBJECTIVE OPTIMIZATION ALGORITHM FOR ENHANCING SECURITY
structure with a DAG structure and changes synchronous ac-
counting to asynchronous accounting. It has the features of
fast transaction speed, robust scalability, and high safety factor.
Meanwhile, sharding [14] is an internal distribution scheme of
the blockchain that divides the blockchain network into several
small transaction networks to achieve parallel processing, which
greatly improves the throughput performance of the blockchain.
However, single-shard invalidation can be caused by malicious
nodes.
The most common algorithm in sharding is the PBFT algo-
rithm, which is a proven deterministic consensus algorithm for
achieving final data consistency in peer to peer (P2P) networks.
It allows the existence of malicious nodes with propagated
messages but it will still not affect the security of blockchain
decisions when its proportion is less than one-third of all nodes.
Although the blockchain sharding scheme has contributed to
improving the throughput, there remains the issue that a single
shard occupied by malicious nodes results in shard invalidation
when the total number of malicious nodes is less than one-third
of all nodes in the sharding scheme. Existing methods [15] that
improve the effectiveness of sharding by increasing the size of
nodes or changing the number of shards do not address this
problem fundamentally. Hence, the present article combines
an intelligent optimization algorithm with a shard validation
validity model to ensure the effectiveness of sharding. The
contributions of this article are summarized as follows.
1) A shard validation validity model with four objectives
is designed to address the problem of shard invalidation.
The model addresses shard invalidation probability (SIP),
delay, throughput TH, and the load of malicious nodes
(LMN). The proposed model not only reduces the prob-
ability of shard invalidation but also ensures the highest
throughput.
2) We propose a many-objective optimization algorithm
based on the dynamic reward and penalty mechanism
(MaOEA-DRP). The dynamic reward and penalty mech-
anism dynamically combine the diversity function and
the convergence function to increase the selection pres-
sure and make the population closer to the real Pareto
frontier (PF). At the same time, the weights of the two
functions are dynamically set to classify individuals in
the population, thereby making individuals with different
performances evolve iteratively.
The rest of this article is organized as follows. Section II
introduces related sharding studies and our problem statement.
The proposed shard validation validity model is described in
Section III. Section IV proposes the many-objective optimiza-
tion algorithm. Section V conducts two experiments to verify the
efficiency of our proposed method. Finally, Section VI concludes
the article.
II. RELATED WORK AND PROBLEM STATEMENT
A. Sharding Technology
As an important solution to blockchain scalability problems,
the sharding technology [16] has broad application prospects. It
is composed of three categories: network sharding, transaction
sharding, and state sharding [17]. Network sharding divides
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the blockchain network into multiple small network modules
that can process transactions in parallel. All small network
modules can simultaneously execute the consensus algorithm
in the blockchain to improve the throughput of the blockchain
and reduce the delay. This also allows some transactions to be
processed and stored on a single shard. In actual application
scenarios, the throughput of the blockchain will increase linearly
with the increasing number of nodes. This is the main research
content of the present article. Transaction sharding refers to
dividing different transactions into different shards, which can
greatly reduce the calculation overhead by allocating some
highly related transactions to the same shard. State sharding,
also called data sharding, classifies the data of the entire net-
work according to the state, and each shard only processes its
own data. However, no effective solution for the problem of
mutual communication between heterogeneous nodes has been
obtained.
The sharding technology was first proposed by Wang et al.
[18] and it can usually be applied to databases and cloud archi-
tecture. Compared with the traditional nonsharded blockchains,
the sharding technology allows communication, data storage,
and computational overload to be processed in parallel between
shards, which can significantly improve the transaction through-
put of the entire blockchain network. Saino et al. [19] paid
special attention to the load balancing and cache performance of
sharding but ignored the sharding failure problem. Bugday et al.
[20] used adaptive learning methods to allocate nodes to shards,
which helps reduce the possibility of single-shard failure due
to a large number of malicious nodes. However, the sharding
scheme should also guarantee the maximum throughput [21].
Yun et al. [22] proposed a shard allocation scheme of the trust
value model (TBSD). This scheme prevents the aggregation
of malicious nodes by combining the node trust model and
genetic algorithm. But this is a single-objective optimization
problem, and thus, it cannot guarantee the optimal performance
of the sharding scheme. Liu et al. [23] designed a special
three-tiered sharding blockchain network that can significantly
improve transaction efficiency and system scalability. However,
sharding effectiveness is still worth considering. In addition to
ensuring that the sharding is effective, an optimal sharding allo-
cation scheme also needs to improve the sharding performance,
such as throughput. In our opinion, the sharding scheme is a
many-objective optimization problem [24]. Preventing sharding
failure is certainly an important topic, but how to improve the
throughput of the system and reduce the running time while
ensuring the effectiveness of sharding is the focus of this article.
B. Problem Statement
The combination of IIoT and blockchain technology [25] has
become an important solution to protect the data security. The
most common method is to use the IIoT terminal data center
as a blockchain miner node. A consensus mechanism is added
to compete for the qualification of writing blocks. Eventually,
transactions and data transmission between IIoT mobile terminal
devices are recorded in the blockchain, and the decentralization
of the blockchain is used to effectively guarantee IoT data
security.
7652 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL INFORMATICS, VOL. 17, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2021
Fig. 1. Blockchain application model for IIoT.
Fig. 2. Sharding scheme leads to the aggregation of malicious nodes.
It can be seen from Fig. 1 that user data and computing tasks
are generally transferred to edge notes (EN) using distributed
units (DU) in IIoT [26]. However, because user equipment (UE)
is in a harsh environment for a long time, it is impossible to
ensure that the task to be migrated for each device has not been
tampered with. In order to avoid computing tasks across the
entire network from being tampered with, we adopt a method
that combines IIoT and blockchain networks. The blockchain
nodes are composed of all UE and DU. The UE layer con-
sists of ordinary nodes, and the DU layer contains consensus
nodes. The ordinary nodes only transmit and receive ledger
data, while consensus nodes perform consensus operations and
generate blocks. Malicious consensus nodes tamper with the
data, causing excessive computing overhead and even paralysis
of the IIoT. This article assumes that each attacked UE will send
the wrong calculation task to the DU, and therefore, we model
the DU layer with multiobjective optimization combined with
the blockchain sharding technology and propose an effective
blockchain sharding scheme.
In general, network sharding is generally considered to be
an on-chain capacity expansion technology. On the condition
that there are some fixed number of nodes across the network,
the more network shards, the fewer the number of nodes on the
chain within each shard. This can result in a higher efficiency of
the single-shard consensus and increased transaction efficiency
of the entire network; however, the security of the blockchain
network will be reduced. In this article, we are mainly consider-
ing the network sharding scheme based on the PBFT consensus
algorithm.
Fig. 2 shows two sharding schemes. In scheme 1, there is
one malicious node in each of the two shards. When we have
the Byzantine fault tolerance within a shard, the proportion of
malicious nodes is less than one-third of the total number of
shard points, and the consensus can be reached. In scheme 2,
the two malicious nodes (nodes 6 and 8) are assigned to the
same shard, resulting in the proportion of malicious nodes in the
shard exceeding one-third, and the failure to reach a consensus
invalidates the shard. Therefore, with the number of network
nodes increasing, how to obtain an optimal sharding scheme so
that each sharding does not fail is an urgent problem to be solved.
III. SHARD VALIDATION VALIDITY MODEL
In view of the invalidation of shards in the blockchain, this
section designs a shard validation validity model to make mali-
cious nodes more evenly distributed among multiple shards. The
sharding optimization scheme has the following four objectives:
1) minimizing the SIP;
2) minimizing the delay;
3) maximizing the throughput;
4) balancing the LMN.
These are elaborated in the following part.
A. Shard Invalidation Probability
The shard validity probability is the most important problem
to be addressed. In order to prevent the shard failure, we reduce
SIP. When calculating the probability, we found that a node can
only appear in two identities, namely, the malicious node and
the honest node, and these two nodes are independent of each
other. This is a probability model that conforms to the binomial
distribution. Therefore, we calculate the invalidation probability
of shards by the following equation:

s 
ki
SIP = Ckbi fi b (1 − fi )k − b (1)
i = 1 b=ki /3
fi = Mi /ki (2)
where s is the number of shards, and ki is the total number of
nodes in the ith shard. fi refers to the proportion of malicious
nodes in relation to the total number of sharding nodes in the
ith shard. Mi is the number of malicious nodes in the ith
shard. This is a probabilistic calculation consistent with the
binomial distribution because in a sharding, only if the number
of malicious nodes exceeds one-third of the total number of
sharding nodes, will the sharding become invalid. Therefore,
we calculate the failure probability of the shards in each case
with more than one-third of the nodes and sum them up.
B. Delay (TD)
Since sharding divides the blockchain into multiple chains for
parallel execution, there is a delay problem between multiple
chains because of the length of execution. Therefore, we intend
to minimize the delay and obtain the execution time of each
shard.
First, the leader node sends a message to other nodes. After
accepting this message, these nodes need to send the message
to other nodes. Through this Byzantine consensus mechanism,
it is ensured that the shards are not invaded by malicious nodes.
Therefore, for node i and node j, the transmission time is 2 ×
D(i → j)/v. Minimizing the maximum transmission time can
CAI et al.: SHARDING SCHEME-BASED MANY-OBJECTIVE OPTIMIZATION ALGORITHM FOR ENHANCING SECURITY
reduce the delay. The equation is as follows:
max(Dis(l → m) + 2 × D(m → n))
T = (3)
v
s increase the selection pressure and make the population closer
T D = max Ti (4)
i=1
where Dis(l → m) represents the distance from the leader
node to the mth node. D(m → n) is the distance between the
mth node and nth node. v indicates that the propagation rate
of electromagnetic waves in free space is the speed of light
3 × 105 km/s. Considering the actual situation where malicious
nodes will attack the blockchain network, we add Dis(l → m)
when modeling the delay. D(m → n) is used to simulate an
attack from a malicious node, and the result of the attack will
eventually increase the delay.
C. Throughput
While reducing the SIP, we should also ensure that the
throughput TH of the system is maximized. The parallel exe-
cution of multiple shards can improve system throughput. The
throughput value is the number of transactions executed per
second. We simulate it as the average number of nodes in the
shard. The more nodes there are, the more transactions can be
executed. The equation can be expressed as
s
ki
TH = (5)
T
i=1 i
where Ti is the execution time of the ith shard. The greater the
throughput, the better the system performance.
D. Load of Malicious Nodes
By reducing SIP, we can control the number of malicious
nodes in each shard. It is necessary to ensure that malicious nodes
do not affect the security of the shard, but we also cannot make
the number of malicious nodes in the shard too small because
this would cause an increase in the number of malicious nodes
in other shards and make the shard invalid. To scatter malicious
nodes in different shards as much as possible and prevent shard
failure, we follow

 s
1 N 2
LMN =  (ki − ) (6)
s i=1 s sparse areas. P A(pi ) is the mapping distance from the individual
where N is the total number of nodes. Through this equation,
we can evenly distribute the malicious nodes among different
shards as much as possible to prevent the case of having too
many or too few malicious nodes in a single shard.
IV. MAOEA-DRP ALGORITHM
In this section, the dynamic reward and punishment mecha-
nism is proposed on the basis of the balanceable fitness estima-
tion (BFE) method [27]. This is an improved strategy that can
dynamically adjust the weight value of the diversity function
and the convergence function, and its effect is better than that of
the original method.
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A. Dynamic Reward and Penalty Mechanism
The dynamic reward and penalty mechanism dynamically
combines the diversity function and the convergence function to
to the real PF. At the same time, the weights of the two functions
are dynamically set to classify the individuals in the population;
this makes the individuals with different performances evolve
iteratively according to the reward and penalty mechanism. The
calculation is
DRP = δ × C(pi ) + ζ × D(pi ) (7)
where C(pi ) and D(pi ) represent the convergence function and
diversity function of the population, respectively, and δ and ζ are
two weight vectors. As the number of iterations increases, the
diversity and convergence functions are dynamically rewarded
and punished by these two weights. Specifically, the conver-
gence function C(pi ) represents the convergence ability of the
population and calculates the Euclidean distance from the in-
dividual f  (pi ) to the ideal point z ∗ = {z1min , z2min , . . . , zM
min
}.
The greater the value of C(pi ), the closer the individual is to the
ideal point, which enhances the selection pressure. This can be
expressed by
C(pi ) = 1 − f  (pi ) − z ∗  . (8)
The normalized diversity function D(pi ) calculates the Eu-
clidean distance from each individual to its nearest neighbor and
can be expressed by (9). The greater the distance, the better the
diversity of the population.
E(pi ) − Emin
D(pi ) = . (9)
Emax − Emin
Here, E(pi ) is the minimum Euclidean distance between indi-
vidual i and other individuals. Emin and Emax are the minimum
and maximum distances, respectively.
The design of the weighting factor will greatly affect the
performance of the algorithm, and its value directly affects
the effectiveness of the diversity function and the convergence
function. Therefore, we have designed dynamic weights. meanc
is the mean convergence distance and is used to divide the
individual into two parts: the area near to and the area far from the
ideal point. By comparing the individual values D(pi ) with mean
diversity distance meand , we can describe crowded parts and
to the ideal point, and P B(pi ) is the vertical distance from the
individual to the reference line
 
 
(f (pi ) − z ∗ ) · z 
T
P A(pi ) = (10)
z
 
 z 
 ∗
P B(pi ) = f (pi ) − (z + P A(pi ) ) . (11)
z 
Here, P A(pi ) and P B(pi ) are used to evaluate the conver-
gence toward the effective frontier and measure the diversity of
the population, respectively. meanP A and meanP B are the mean
values of P A(pi ) and P B(pi ), respectively. The calculations
are expressed in (12) and (13), respectively, where N is the
7654 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL INFORMATICS, VOL. 17, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2021

TABLE I
PARAMETER SETTINGS FOR DTLZ TEST SUITE

Algorithm 1: The Main Framework of MaOEA-DRP.

Input: Population p, the reference point z
Fig. 3. Objective space is divided into four types by meanC , meanD ,
meanP A , and meanP B .
Output: Population P
1: Cmin = min each objective (P )
2: While(t < tmax )
3: Q = Dynamic reward and penalty mechanism//Refer
population size
to (7)

N 4: for i = 1:N
meanP A = P A(pi )/N (12) 5: q1 = Q(randi )
i=1 6: q2 = Q(randi )

N 7: Compare q1 and q2
meanP B = P B(pi )/N . (13) 8: Choose a larger individual put in Q
i=1 9: End for
10: G = Cross operator and mutation operator (Q)
The individuals located at the edge of the coordinate axis that
11: P = Reference point strategy (Q, G)//Refer to
is close to the real front surface but far away from the ideal
non-dominated sorting genetic Algorithm III
point can be found. Fig. 3 shows an example in the 2-D space to
(NSGA-III)
describe the classification. In case 1, these individuals are close
12: Cmin = min each objective (Cmin , P )
to the ideal point and in the sparse region; therefore, the ζ value
13: End while
should reward the diversity and distance the same as δ. In case
2, the individuals are close to ideal points but are in relatively
crowded areas, and ζ is set between 0.6 and 1.0 to penalize their
software is MATLAB, the system RAM is 16 GB, and the
diversity distance. Similar to in the first case, the individuals in
processor is Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-9750H CPU@2.60 GHz.
the third case are close to the edge of the PF and are relatively
sparse, and thus they all need to be rewarded. Finally, case 4 has
the worst individuals, which should be punished for convergence A. Comparison Experiments
and diversity distance. First, the parameter settings for the DTLZ test function are
introduced in Table I, including the population size, number of
B. Framework of MAOEA-DRP decisions, and number of objectives. The value of parameter k
is different for each test suite. k = 5 for DTLZ1, k = 10 for
The detailed flow of our proposed algorithm is expressed
DTLZ2-6, and k = 20 for DTLZ7. The number of decisions is
in Algorithm 1 through pseudocode. First, we initialize the
determined by M − 1 + k, where M represents the number of
population and calculate the objective function value. Parents
objectives.
with better performance can produce high-quality offsprings,
In order to verify the influence of the improved BFE strategy
which can accelerate population evolution in a better direction.
on the algorithm performance, the average BFE function values
Therefore, the dynamic reward and penalty mechanism is used
are analyzed. It can be seen from Fig. 4 that the BFE strategy
to select better performing parents. At the same time, a cross op-
produced the worst performance and its average value tended
erator and a mutation operator are executed to produce superior
to 0.25. For MaOEA-DPR, the average value of BFE gradually
offspring. Finally, the parents and offspring are combined, and
increased with the number of iterations until it reached about
the best solution is selected by using a reference point strategy.
0.45; the overall performance was better.
The best solution is passed to the next generation. The population
The many-objective optimization algorithms used for com-
is output until the final iteration.
parisons are NSGA-III [28], Two_Arch2 [29], VaEA [30],
EFRRR [31], and KnEA [32]. The characteristics of the DTLZ
V. SIMULATION EXPERIMENTS
test function are presented in [31]. The maximum number of
First, we conduct experiments to compare our proposed algo- iterations is 10 000, and each algorithm runs 20× independently.
rithm with other many-objective optimization algorithms. Then, The probability of cross and mutation is set to 1/20. The inverted
we conduct comparisons regarding the shard validation. All generational distance (IGD) [33] indicator is an important per-
experiments are run under Windows 10 OS. The simulation formance indicator for evaluating many-objective optimization
CAI et al.: SHARDING SCHEME-BASED MANY-OBJECTIVE OPTIMIZATION ALGORITHM FOR ENHANCING SECURITY
Fig. 4. Average values of the BFE function.
Fig. 5. Nondominated frontier on the sharding validation
validity model for six different algorithms. (a) NSGA-III. (b)
Two_Arch2. (c) Vector angle based evolutionary algorithm (VaEA).
(d) Ensemble fitness ranking with a ranking restriction (EFRRR). (e)
Knee point driven evolutionary algorithm (KnEA). (f) MaOEA-DPR.
algorithms and it can be expressed by (14). In this equation, P
represents the individual, and Z is the number of reference points
that are uniformly distributed along the PF in space. d(zi , pj )
represents the Euclidean distance between the individual and
the reference point. The smaller the IGD value, the better the
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performance.
|Z|
1  |P |
IGD(P, Z) = min d(zi , pj ). (14)
Z i=1j =1
Table II lists the average and variance of IGD obtained by
the six algorithms after 20 independent run times. Symbols
“+/−/=” reflect the comparison result, indicating that the com-
pared algorithm has superior, inferior, or equal performance
compared with our proposed MAOEA-DPR algorithm. The best
results are shown in black font.
We can observe that MAOEA-DPR has a total of 19 optimal
performance solutions. The performance difference is not ob-
vious on DTLZ4. The reason for this be that these algorithms
have little difference when dealing with a series of nonuniform
many-objective optimization problems. At the same time, in
the DTLZ2 test function with concave features, our algorithm
performed poorly on six and eight objectives. It also performed
poorly on DTLZ7. The reason for this be that DTLZ7 is a mixed,
nonconnected, multimodel model, and our proposed algorithm
is not suitable for solving this type of model. Our algorithm
showed better performance in other test functions, and overall,
it has the best performance.
B. Comparison Experiments Combining
Proposed Model
To verify the effectiveness of our proposed model, we com-
bined six algorithms with a model addressing shard validation.
First, we initialized 600 nodes. The 3σ principles of the state
distribution satisfy the number of malicious nodes not higher
than 1/3 1−P (μ−σ<X<μ + σ) = 31.7%.
Fig. 5 shows the nondominated frontier for six different
algorithms, which can see the conflict between the various
objectives clearly. Our objectives are to minimize SIP, minimize
the delay, maximize the throughput, and balance the LMN.
As can be seen from Fig. 5, the convergence performance of
NSGA-III, EFRRR, and MaOEA-DRP is better than those of
other algorithms for the first objective. Meanwhile, the diversity
performance of the second objective is better; furthermore, the
nodes in MaOEA-DRP are more evenly distributed. KnEA and
MaOEA-DRP algorithms can better show the conflict, and the
performance of convergence and diversity is better, too. In
summary, it can be concluded that the MaOEA-DRP algorithm
has the best nondominated frontier.
The solution obtained by the many-objective optimization
algorithm is a population, and it is impossible to intuitively
compare the performance of different algorithms. This makes
the problem of selecting solutions in the field of intelligent opti-
mization a difficult problem. However, in practical applications,
since all the obtained solutions are nondominated solutions with
a similar performance, we only need to select them according to
the specific needs or preferences of users or enterprises. In this
article, we first select the individual with the largest throughput
in each algorithm of the obtained population and compare the
performance in regards to other objectives on the basis of en-
suring the maximum throughput. From the comparison results
in Table III, we can see that MaOEA-DPR not only shows
7656 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL INFORMATICS, VOL. 17, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2021

TABLE II
COMPARISON EXPERIMENT FOR DIFFERENT MANY-OBJECTIVE OPTIMIZATION ALGORITHM ON DTLZ TEST FUNCTION
CAI et al.: SHARDING SCHEME-BASED MANY-OBJECTIVE OPTIMIZATION ALGORITHM FOR ENHANCING SECURITY
TABLE III
COMPARISON OF OTHER OBJECTIVE FUNCTION VALUES WHEN
THROUGHPUT IS MAXIMUM
TABLE IV
COMPARISON RESULTS OF THE MEAN FOR EACH OBJECTIVE IN POPULATION
advantages in the throughput but also in the other objectives.
The solution obtained by our algorithm is the best.
In order to compare the performance of obtained populations
more fairly, we took the mean value of each objective for
comparison. It can be seen from Table IV that the performance
is the best with regards to the last three objectives, but the
first objective is slightly worse than the NSGA-III and VaEA
algorithms. But overall, our algorithm still performs well, thus
verifying the effectiveness of our proposed model.
VI. CONCLUSION
The sharding technology is promising to address the ex-
pansion problem in blockchain technology. In this article, we
intended to address the contradiction between the throughput
and validity of the sharding technology. A many-objective op-
timization algorithm was proposed to optimize the shard vali-
dation validity model. The experimental results showed that the
algorithm can address the conflict between throughput and shard
validity for better security in the blockchain-enabled IIoT.
This article provided an important reference for future
blockchain research. Additionally, our proposed algorithm can
be used to address other optimization problems in blockchain
technology to enhance security for IIoT. In this article, the
number of nodes was a fixed value; therefore, our future work
will address the problem of dynamic nodes.
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I: Solving problems with box constraints,” IEEE Trans. Evol. Comput., University, Xi’an, China, in 2008.
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pattern recognition and intelligent systems from
the Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of
Xingjuan Cai received the Ph.D. degree in con- Sciences (CAS), Beijing, China, in 2000.
trol theory and engineering from Tongji Univer- He is currently a Professor with Machine
sity, Shanghai, China, in 2017. Learning and Data Mining and the Director of
She is currently a Professor with the School the Research and Development, Institute of Au-
of Computer Science and Technology, Taiyuan tomation, CAS, Beijing. His current research in-
University of Science and Technology, Taiyuan, terests include computer vision, pattern recogni-
China. Her interests include cloud computing, tion, artificial intelligence, and computer–human
and bioinspired computation and applications. interaction.

Shaojin Geng Shaojin Geng is currently

working on task scheduling strategy in
multi-cloud environment toward the M.S.
degree with the School of Computer Science
and Technology, Taiyuan University of Science
and Technology, Taiyuan, China.
His research interests include cloud
computing, computational intelligence, and
combinatorial optimization.
research topics.
Jinjun Chen (Senior Member, IEEE) received
the Ph.D. degree in information technology
from the Swinburne University of Technology,
Hawthorn, VIC, Australia, in 2007.
He is currently a Professor with the
Swinburne University of Technology. His
research results have been published by
various conferences and journals including
various IEEE/ACM transactions. His research
interests include scalability, data systems, cloud
computing, data privacy, and related various

Jingbo Zhang is currently working on com-

pressed sensing of hyperspectral image based
on many–objective optimization toward the M.S.
degree with the School of Computer Science
and Technology, Taiyuan University of Science
and Technology, Taiyuan, China.
His research interests include computational
intelligence and combinatorial optimization.

Di Wu is currently working on eelection strategy

of many-objective optimization algorithm toward
the M.S. degree with the School of Computer
Science and Technology, Taiyuan University of
Science and Technology, Taiyuan, China.
Her research interests include computational
intelligence and algorithm optimization.