A Reputation Based Consensus Mechanism Inspired by Ant Colony Optimization (ACO)
Takia Nawrin, Md. Yusuf, Maftun Ahommed, Fahmeda Hossain Orna, Iffat Jahan Kona, Nafees Mansoor
Conference Paper. IEEE International WIE Conference on Electrical and Computer Engineering/WIECON-ECE, no. 2025, pp. 1120–1125 (2025).
Abstract
Enhanced and transparent data exchange is crucial for enterprises when it comes to averting fraud and ensuring operational dependability. Efficient collaboration is usually compromised with centralized systems that are likely to be manipulated, susceptible to unauthorized access, and lacking in trust. Controlled, auditable transactions have been shown to offer a powerful solution to permissioned blockchains, with frameworks such as Hyperledger Fabric adding support to modular consensus and privacy preserving designs. Nevertheless, conventional consensus protocols, like Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) and Proof of Authority (PoA) are restricted in terms of scalability, centralization threats, and fixed selection of the leaders. The article presents a Reputation-Based Consensus Mechanism (RBCM), which is based on the ant colony optimization inspired clustering and dynamically changing reputation scoring. Blended with Hyperledger Fabric, RBCM evaluates node trustworthiness, dynamically chooses trustworthy leaders and alleviates malicious behavior. According to theoretical analysis, RBCM offers a higher level of security, scalability and fairness, which make it very suitable in enterprise applications. © 2025 IEEE.
Keywords
Bio-Inspired Computing, Hyperledger Fabric, Permissioned Blockchain, Reputation-Based Consensus, Trust Management