A Blockchain-based Traceability System for AI-Driven Engine Blade Inspection

TL;DR

BladeChain is a blockchain-based system that ensures immutable, auditable, and tamper-evident traceability of aircraft engine blade inspections, integrating multi-stakeholder endorsement, AI model provenance, and automated scheduling.

Contribution

The paper introduces BladeChain, the first blockchain system to unify multi-stakeholder endorsement, AI model provenance, and automated inspection scheduling for aerospace blade maintenance.

Findings

Achieved 100% lifecycle completion in prototype testing.

Maintained a throughput of 26 operations per minute.

Detected tampering within 17 milliseconds.

Abstract

Aircraft engine blade maintenance relies on inspection records shared across manufacturers, airlines, maintenance organizations, and regulators. Yet current systems are fragmented, difficult to audit, and vulnerable to tampering. This paper presents BladeChain, a blockchain-based system providing immutable traceability for blade inspections throughout the component life cycle. BladeChain is the first system to integrate multi-stakeholder endorsement, automated inspection scheduling, AI model provenance, and cryptographic evidence binding, delivering auditable maintenance traceability for aerospace deployments. Built on a four-stakeholder Hyperledger Fabric network (OEM, Airline, MRO, Regulator), BladeChain captures every life-cycle event in a tamper-evident ledger. A chaincode-enforced state machine governs blade status transitions and automatically triggers inspections when configurable flight hour, cycle, or calendar thresholds are exceeded, eliminating manual scheduling errors. Inspection artifacts are stored off-chain in IPFS and linked to on-chain records via SHA-256 hashes, with each inspection record capturing the AI model name and version used for defect detection. This enables regulators to audit both what defects were found and how they were found. The detection module is pluggable, allowing organizations to adopt or upgrade inspection models without modifying the ledger or workflows. We built a prototype and evaluated it on workloads of up to 100 blades, demonstrating 100% life cycle completion with consistent throughput of 26 operations per minute. A centralized SQL baseline quantifies the consensus overhead and highlights the security trade-off. Security validation confirms tamper detection within 17~ms through hash verification.