Blockchain-based Digital Twins: Research Trends, Issues, and Future Challenges

TL;DR

This paper reviews the integration of blockchain technology with Digital Twins in industrial settings, emphasizing trustworthiness, data integrity, and AI-driven insights, while discussing current challenges and future research directions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive survey of blockchain-based Digital Twins, highlighting their benefits, current research trends, and proposing a framework for trustworthy implementation.

Findings

Blockchain enhances data trustworthiness in Digital Twins.

AI plays a crucial role in analyzing blockchain-enabled Digital Twins.

Identifies key challenges and future research directions for blockchain-based Digital Twins.

Abstract

Industrial processes rely on sensory data for decision-making processes, risk assessment, and performance evaluation. Extracting actionable insights from the collected data calls for an infrastructure that can ensure the dissemination of trustworthy data. For the physical data to be trustworthy, it needs to be cross-validated through multiple sensor sources with overlapping fields of view. Cross-validated data can then be stored on the blockchain, to maintain its integrity and trustworthiness. Once trustworthy data is recorded on the blockchain, product lifecycle events can be fed into data-driven systems for process monitoring, diagnostics, and optimized control. In this regard, Digital Twins (DTs) can be leveraged to draw intelligent conclusions from data by identifying the faults and recommending precautionary measures ahead of critical events. Empowering DTs with blockchain in industrial use-cases targets key challenges of disparate data repositories, untrustworthy data dissemination, and the need for predictive maintenance. In this survey, while highlighting the key benefits of using blockchain-based DTs, we present a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art research results for blockchain-based DTs. Based on the current research trends, we discuss a trustworthy blockchain-based DTs framework. We highlight the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in blockchain-based DTs. Furthermore, we discuss current and future research and deployment challenges of blockchain-supported DTs that require further investigation.