Secure sharing of big digital twin data for smart manufacturing based on blockchain

Abstract With the rapid development of digital twin technology, a large amount of digital twin data named as big digital twin data (BDTD), is generated in the lifecycle of equipment, which is supposed to be used in digital twin enabled applications. However, in the implementation of these applications, data sharing problem which is caused by the lack of data security as well as trust among stakeholders of equipment, limits data using value. It is a novel way to introduce blockchain technology into digital twin to solve the problem. However, current methods cannot fulfill the requirements of exponential growth and timely sharing of BDTD. Therefore, a blockchain-based framework for secure sharing of BDTD is proposed to solve the problems. Cloud storage is integrated into the framework, with which, BDTD is encrypted and stored in Cloud, while the hash of BDTD and transaction records are stored in blockchain. Some rules of generating new block are designed to improve the processing speed of blockchain. An algorithm for optimal sampling rate selection is presented to maximize total social benefits of the participants of BDTD sharing. Simulation results show that the algorithm is better than traditional method for maximizing the total social benefits. Furthermore, a protype system is developed and evaluated based on Fabric test network. Evaluation results show that BDTD can be shared securely multiple times per second through the framework, which demonstrates the feasibility of the framework in supporting timely sharing of BDTD.