Trusted twins for a remote world factory

Pandemic starting in 2020 made many of us pause and reflect the current dynamics that operate our world. Many of the things that we took for granted became dearer and more valuable to us. For some it caused a reset in work life balance and for some it skewed the work life balance, the scales tilt more for latter probably.

The year 2021 started with news around auto manufacturing industry taken to a chip shortage scenario due to the way semiconductor industry demands [1] were forecasted in 2020. In second trend I evaluated, GDPs that were brought to their knee over the year also started holding back on their resources[2] tightly further causing a knock on effect on supply chain dependent industries. Third trend [3] that I consider is the mass lockdowns mid of last year that exposed sheer dependency on labor intensive industries, that made many investors rethink about future locations of their factories.

This is where my imagination goes in for a scenario to tackle few problems like these in the digital world. In a blockchain enabled digital twin solution, we should be able to create a trusted twin model of a factory and its core components and machinery that are digitally constructed on a blockchain, and can be recreated. What this might imply is if machinery comes from another vendor then this vendor has sold a digital twin to the factory while selling the machine, this is already an ongoing initiative too to some extent in terms of remote operations. 

However, now extrapolate this to a digital twin orchestrator that has heterogenous twin models that can be orchestrated and operated together as a complete factory. The glue that binds it together is a trusted model copy on blockchain for each of the small and large components digital enabled on cloud from heterogeneous vendors that constitute a complete factory. In its true form this orchestrated twin blueprint can then be applied and operated wherever actual assembly/reassembly of components and machines can be done.

Is our world prepared to undergo this level of digital overhaul?

References:

[1] https://www.extremetech.com/computing/319049-the-semiconductor-shortage-has-come-for-the-auto-industry

[2] https://www.ft.com/content/6bdc2df6-04c0-4f10-b5b4-9169e3d1a536

[3] https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/@dgreports/@dcomm/documents/genericdocument/wcms_748428.pdf