Blockchain Powered QA Process Management for Digital Twins

Abstract

In recent years, the concept of Digital Twins (DTs) has been implemented in different sectors to support product lifecycle. However, because of a huge number of participants in the development process, managing data flows in DTs becomes a challenge, especially when we concentrate on evaluating the product or entity quality from supply chain partners – in other words, the customer in a supply chain may have a different view of quality assurance (QA) than the supplier has, due to a typical large interpretation scope of quality in contracts and agreements, especially for Cyber Physical Systems. To overcome the problem, blockchains can be applied to build a secured environment for the QA information exchange. With the concept of smart contracts, suppliers and customers can align the required information about quality assurance to transparently work towards a bilateral quality agreement. While the general information like a number of passing tests can be shared, the details of tests are only shared among private agreements. In this paper, we present a blockchain based QA process management for DTs to increase the reliability of the network and maintain the private information of participants. Our experiments showed that our blockchain application has the capability to be deployed in multiple partners while guaranteeing network reliability and data privacy.