TY - JOUR
T1 - A Blockchain-Based Approach for the Creation of Digital Twins
AU - Hasan, Haya R.
AU - Salah, Khaled
AU - Jayaraman, Raja
AU - Omar, Mohammed
AU - Yaqoob, Ibrar
AU - Pesic, Sasa
AU - Taylor, Todd
AU - Boscovic, Dragan
N1 - Funding Information:
This work was supported by the Khalifa University of Science and Technology under Award CIRA-2019-001 and RCII-2019-002- Research Center for Digital Supply Chain and Operations Management.
Funding Information:
This work was supported by the Khalifa University of Science and Technology under Award CIRA-2019-001 and RCII-2019-002-Research Center for Digital Supply Chain and Operations Management.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2013 IEEE.
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Digital twins
KW - Ethereum
KW - Industry 4.0
KW - blockchain
KW - security
KW - smart contracts
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U2 - 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.2974810
DO - 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.2974810
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85080898974
SN - 2169-3536
VL - 8
SP - 34113
EP - 34126
JO - IEEE Access
JF - IEEE Access
M1 - 9001017
ER -