Blockchain-enabled digital twin collaboration platform for heterogeneous socialized manufacturing resource management

Social manufacturing is conceptualised as a new type of networked manufacturing paradigm that supports the organisation of socialised manufacturing resources (SMRs) to satisfy the growth of personalised demands on crowd intelligence in a timely manner when co-creating open architecture products. The high participation of each stakeholder in this type of product production places a higher requirement on sufficient collaboration among social, cyber and physical spaces. However, under a decentralised social manufacturing network, the management of SMRs has encountered some real-life challenges in terms of their distributed and heterogeneous features. Hence, this paper proposes a blockchain-enabled digital twin collaboration platform (BcDTCP) as an integrated solution to address these challenges. A hybrid domain-driven design method is presented to design and implement business-knowledge driven systems. To address the heterogeneity of SMRs, a ubiquitous object structure is designed to flexibly adjust the functionality of the digital twin. Blockchain is introduced to construct a peer-to-peer network to organise the SMRs in a decentralised manner. Additionally, a timed coloured Petri net-based workflow is adopted to formulise the collaboration logic into a smart contract executed on the blockchain. Finally, a demonstrative case study is conducted to verify and evaluate the proposed BcDTCP under a 3D printing scenario.