Blockchain-based digital twin sharing platform for reconfigurable socialized manufacturing resource integration

Abstract The emergence of social manufacturing has facilitated the evolution of resource organization in the manufacturing industry, with a trend towards a flat management structure. The mass absorption of socialized idle resources that lack a digitalized and intelligent basis has influenced the efficiency of collaborative production. The digital twin has been widely applied to promote cyber collaboration through the multidimensional digitalization of physical resources. As a knowledge-intensive software entity, it is impractical for resource owners, especially individuals and small and micro businesses, to implement digital twins. To make sufficient use of the sharing convenience in the social manufacturing community (SMC), this paper proposes a blockchain-based digital twin sharing platform to enable software copyright protection and simplify heterogeneous manufacturing resource integration in decentralized and distributed environments. Domain-driven design is adopted as the major methodology to recognize the problem domain and partition the business subdomains. Blockchain technology is introduced to construct a novel sharing schema to preserve and retrieve the copyrights of digital twins under a distributed and decentralized SMC network. Furthermore, to enhance the reusability of digital twins, a reconfigurable digital twin architecture is proposed to enable UPnP implementation of shared digital twins under heterogeneous deployment environments. Finally, a demonstrative case study motivated by a real-life 3D printing scenario is conducted to verify and evaluate the proposed platform.