BDTwins: Blockchain-based Digital Twins Lifecycle Management

Abstract

In Industry 4.0, the Digital twin has been widely used in industrial activities. However, the data-driven industry is placing a higher demand on digital twins, especially for the secure sharing and management of data throughout the lifecycle. As a distributed ledger technology, Blockchain is well suited to address these challenges. Unfortunately, current blockchain-based digital twin lifecycle management does not focus on data processing after the retirement stage. In this paper, we propose BDTwins, a blockchain-based digital twin lifecycle management framework, which is built based on our proposed 7D model. In this framework, we make innovative use of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFT) to process the data in the recovery stage of the digital twin. This method solves digital intellectual property disputes and inherits digital twin knowledge completely and stably after the destruction of physical entities. In addition, BDTwins has designed a fine-grained hierarchical access control policy to enable secure data sharing among stakeholders. And solves the performance bottleneck of traditional single-chain blockchain architecture by utilizing directed acyclic graph (DAG) blockchain and off-chain distributed storage. Finally, we implement a general blockchain-based digital twin case using smart contract technology to demonstrate our proposed digital twin lifecycle management framework.