Empowering digital twins with blockchain

A digital twin is an exact digital/logical/cyber/virtual representation/replica of any tangible physical system or process. And the digital twin runs on a competent IT infrastructure (say, cloud centers). In essence, a digital twin is typically a software program that takes various real-world data about a ground-level physical system as prospective inputs and produces useful outputs in the form of insights. The outputs generally are the value-adding and decision-enabling predictions or simulations of how that physical system will act on those inputs. These help in quickly and easily realizing highly optimized and organized products with less cost and risk. The manufacturing industry had embraced the digital twin technology long time back to be modern in their operations, outputs, and offerings. The distinct contributions of the digital twin paradigm, since then, have gone up significantly with the seamless synchronization with a number of pioneering technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), big and streaming data analytics, data lakes, software-defined cloud environments, blockchain, etc. With the concept of cyber physical systems (CPS) is being adopted and adapted widely and wisely, complicated yet sophisticated electronics devices at the ground level are being blessed with their corresponding digital twins. The digital twins enable data scientists and system designers to optimize a number of things including process excellence, knowledge discovery and dissemination in time, better system design, robust verification and validation, etc. In the recent past, with the flourishing of the blockchain technology, the scope for digital twins has gone up remarkably. This unique combination is bound to produce additional competencies and fresh use cases for enterprises. This chapter is to explain how they integrate and initiate newer opportunities to be grabbed and gained for a better tomorrow.