A Visionary Model on Blockchain-based Accountability for Secure and Collaborative Digital Twin Environments

Abstract

With the recent advancements in blockchain technology, it has become obvious that this technology is not just for crypto-currencies but instead can be used as a decentralized tool for better accountability. Blockchain has the capacity to transform the industries disruptively as it presents new features like smart contracts, tokenization of content, eliminating counterfeit products, supply chain improvement, digital twins, and end-to-end security. This paper presents a blockchain-based model for distributed and collaborative digital twin environments which is becoming indispensable in new “Any 4.0” era. The proposed model includes a public or private authority in the digital twin ecosystem providing non-repudiation of blockchain transactions, holistic security and privacy preservation. The proposed technique is based on the “X-by-design” and “X-as-a-service” principles which can be discussed as a novel model for better security, accountability and integrity in decentralized mechanisms. In order to elucidate, two case studies are described where the digital twin operations, stakeholders' activities and regarding transactions are stored on a blockchain.