International Journal of Mechanical Engineering and Applications

Special Issue

Blockchain Empowered Digital Twins Collaboration for Smart Manufacturing

  • Submission Deadline: May 31, 2022
  • Status: Submission Closed
  • Lead Guest Editor: Radhya Sahal
About This Special Issue
Multiple digital twins are deployed to represent the up-to-date industrial data of the physical assets in operation, including asset status within manufacturing. These digital twins collaborate by sharing and exchanging information among entities and sharing tasks to act accordingly. When it comes to adopting digital twins collaboration, the manufacturing sector has a crucial benefit, including communication, sensing, and power, which have been utilized to process massive volumes of information to overcome the issues such as downtime. Furthermore, considering the capabilities of the blockchain technology within the design phase of digital twins will empower the privacy, security, transparency, and traceability of the set of digital twins that are being collaborated and interacting. In particular, blockchain technology is beneficial for digital twins collaboration to 1) maintain the trust among network peers, which digital twins represent, 2) allow traceability across the entire digital twins' network, 3) provide insightful consensus-based decision-making process, and 4) deliver efficient and reliable solutions by utilizing the decentralization feature of blockchain technology. However, there are still many challenges requiring further investigation to identify the requirements of empowering blockchain and digital twins collaboration to add progressive value to make the manufacturing systems smarter.
This special issue targets exploring new research direction in digital twins collaboration in combination with blockchain technology. The aim will document the current state-of-the-art and identify future directions in blockchain-based digital twins collaboration for research work in the manufacturing field. Also, this issue is designed to highlight the applications, industrial experiments, studies and use cases of adopting blockchain and digital twins collaboration in manufacturing.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
Blockchain and digital twins collaboration for Industry 4.0
Blockchain and digital twins collaboration for Industry 5.0
Blockchain, Internet of Things and digital twins collaboration for next generation of manufacturing
Blockchain- empowered digital twins collaboration use cases
Decentralization for collaborative digital twins
Distributed consensus for collaborative digital twins in decision making
Distributed ledger technology for collaborative digital twins
Predictive models for collaborative digital twins
Federated learning for collaborative digital twins
Distributed machine learning and deep learning for collaborative digital twins in manufacturing systems
Blockchain-based digital twins collaboration for COVID-19 pandemic and future pandemic
Real-time system prediction based on collaborative digital twins

Keywords:

  1. Digital Twins
  2. Blockchain
  3. Collaboration
  4. Smart Manufacturing
  5. Decentralization
  6. Industry 4.0
  7. Industry 5.0
Lead Guest Editor
  • Radhya Sahal

    CONFIRM Centre for Smart Manufacturing, School of Computer Science and IT, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland