A Blockchain-Based Approach for the Creation of Digital Twins

Haya R Hasan,Dragan Boscovic,Todd Taylor,Khaled Salah,Raja Jayaraman,Mohammed Omar,Sasa Pesic,Ibrar Yaqoob

doi:10.1109/access.2020.2974810

Abstract

The rapid advancements in computing, storage, communications, and networking technologies have enabled the creation of Digital Twins (DTs). A DT is a digital representation of a real-world physical component, product, or equipment. A DT can be used for 3-D design, testing, simulation, and prototyping prior to the manufacturing of the physical component. Once a physical component is in operation, a DT can be used for configuration, monitoring, diagnostics, and prognostics. It is expected that DTs will gain significant attention in the foreseeable future, and will play a key role in Industry 4.0. However, today’s approaches, systems, and technologies leveraged for the creation of DTs are mostly centralized and fall short of providing trusted data provenance, audit, and traceability. Also, data related to transactions, logs, and history are not secure or tamper-proof. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based creation process of DTs to guarantee secure and trusted traceability, accessibility, and immutability of transactions, logs, and data provenance. Our proposed approach uses smart contracts to govern and track transactions initiated by participants involved in the creation of DTs. Our approach also employs decentralized storage of interplanetary file systems to store and share DTs data. Moreover, we present details on our system design and architecture, implementation, and algorithms. Furthermore, we provide security and cost analysis, and show how our approach fulfills the requirements of DTs process creation. We make the smart contract code for creating DTs publicly available on Github.

Highlights

With unprecedented proliferation of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), advanced data analytics, and high performance computing technologies, Industry 4.0 has brought extensive changes to industrial operations since the past decade
The delivery manager creates an event after changing its state to ‘‘Available for Release’’. This procedure is shown in algorithm 8 that explains how it can be executed by the delivery manager when testing of the Digital Twins (DTs) is completed
When an owner decides that the DT can be released to another prospective new owner, this algorithm can be executed by the current owner of the DT

Summary

Introduction

With unprecedented proliferation of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), advanced data analytics, and high performance computing technologies, Industry 4.0 has brought extensive changes to industrial operations since the past decade. A Digital Twin (DT) is considered as an indispensable component of the CPS concept which refers to a virtual representation of any physical object, process, system, smart city, to name a few [1]. DTs aim to optimize industrial operations and maintain physical assets and manufacturing processes before their creation. The pairing between the digital and physical worlds using streams of data generated by sensory devices helps in terms of proactive maintenance and helps in building predictive simulation models [3]. Performance optimization is one of the prime aspects in industries that can be achieved by creating DTs of real devices including aircraft engines, smart containers, wind turbines, space crafts, and others. A healthcare provider can simulate an operation on a patient’s virtual organ and perform experiments on it with different procedures before performing the real operation on the patient’s physical organ [4]

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