Simulation-Based Digital Twin Development for Blockchain Enabled End-to-End Industrial Hemp Supply Chain Risk Management
This addresses risk management for stakeholders in the industrial hemp supply chain, but it is incremental as it applies existing blockchain and digital twin concepts to a new domain.
The paper tackles the challenges of the Industrial Hemp Supply Chain (IHSC) by proposing a blockchain-enabled system with a simulation-based digital twin for risk management, demonstrating promising performance in improving transparency and guiding decision-making.
With the passage of the 2018 U.S. Farm Bill, Industrial Hemp production is moved from limited pilot programs to a regulated agriculture production system. However, Industrial Hemp Supply Chain (IHSC) faces critical challenges, including: high complexity and variability, very limited production knowledge, lack of data and information tracking. In this paper, we propose blockchain-enabled IHSC and develop a preliminary simulation-based digital twin for this distributed cyber-physical system (CPS) to support the process learning and risk management. Basically, we develop a two-layer blockchain with proof of authority smart contract, which can track the data and key information, improve the supply chain transparency, and leverage local authorities and state regulators to ensure the quality control verification. Then, we introduce a stochastic simulation-based digital twin for IHSC risk management, which can characterize the process spatial-temporal causal interdependencies and dynamic evolution to guide risk control and decision making. Our empirical study demonstrates the promising performance of proposed platform.