Simulation-Based Digital Twin Development for Blockchain Enabled End-to-End Industrial Hemp Supply Chain Risk Management

TL;DR

This paper presents a blockchain-enabled digital twin for the industrial hemp supply chain, combining simulation and blockchain to enhance transparency, risk management, and process understanding in a complex, regulated environment.

Contribution

It introduces a novel two-layer blockchain system with smart contracts and a simulation-based digital twin for comprehensive risk management in the hemp supply chain.

Findings

The platform improves supply chain transparency and data tracking.

The digital twin effectively models process interdependencies and dynamics.

Empirical results show promising performance in risk management.

Abstract

With the passage of the 2018 U.S. Farm Bill, Industrial Hemp production is moved from limited pilot programs to a regulated agriculture production system. However, Industrial Hemp Supply Chain (IHSC) faces critical challenges, including: high complexity and variability, very limited production knowledge, lack of data and information tracking. In this paper, we propose blockchain-enabled IHSC and develop a preliminary simulation-based digital twin for this distributed cyber-physical system (CPS) to support the process learning and risk management. Basically, we develop a two-layer blockchain with proof of authority smart contract, which can track the data and key information, improve the supply chain transparency, and leverage local authorities and state regulators to ensure the quality control verification. Then, we introduce a stochastic simulation-based digital twin for IHSC risk management, which can characterize the process spatial-temporal causal interdependencies and dynamic evolution to guide risk control and decision making. Our empirical study demonstrates the promising performance of proposed platform.