Blockchain-based fine-grained digital twin sharing framework for social manufacturing

The lack of digitalization basis of social manufacturing resources has brought barriers to perform efficient production coordination in social manufacturing network. Digital twin can be a promising carrier for bridging this gap. However, the complexity of digital twin makes small and medium enterprises, and individual resource owners in social manufacturing hard to apply this technology. Benefiting from the convenience of sharing in social communities, this paper presents a blockchain-based fine-grained digital twin sharing framework to accelerate the popularization and iteration of digital twins in social manufacturing. A hybrid design method, called model–view–controller domain-driven design (MVC-DDD), is proposed to decompose and decouple complicated digital twin instances into small granules from software architecture perspective. Then, blockchain is introduced as the underlying infrastructure to innovate the specific sharing mechanisms using zero-knowledge proof for decentralized registering, authorizing, and extracting digital twin granules. Moreover, the sharing incentive mechanism is also explored to ensure the feasibility and sustainability for the whole sharing behaviors. Finally, different types of 3D printers are selected for implementing the referential digital twin architecture for generating the sharable granules. A series of experiments are conducted to show that our sharing mechanism has a good performance in terms of throughput, latency and network bandwidth. Additionally, the incentive mechanism is also analyzed generate the management implications to facilitate the digital twin providers with different scales for sharing.