NFTs for Trusted Traceability and Management of Digital Twins for
Shipping Containers
Abstract
The distribution, traceability, and management of shipping container
logistics require secure data flow and trusted transactions. Digital
Twins (DTs) can realize these features by offering shipping tracking and
traceability, process flow and status monitoring, and management of the
physical containers all in a remote manner. However, the data of a DT
itself is typically stored, controlled, and managed by a centralized
entity, which is often the original creator of the physical container.
Having a centralized entity can cause mistrust. The centralized entity
may alter, tamper, or delete the digital twin data. To overcome this
problem, this paper proposes trusted sharing and management of DTs for
shipping containers by using Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). NFTs are
digital tokens that hold unique data stored, controlled, and managed in
a decentralized and immutable blockchain ledger. We extend in this paper
the use of NFTs to tokenize shipping container DTs and their metadata.
The proposed solution uses NFTs and Ethereum blockchain smart contracts
to offer decentralization, security, transparency, traceability, and
immutability to the data and processes involved in the creation,
storage, and management of DTs of shipping containers. To demonstrate
our solution, we create a DT of a shipping container using Microsoft
Azure Digital Twins services and showed how to tokenize it using NFT. We
assess the system using various test cases to evaluate its main
functionalities. Furthermore, we analyze the cost of transactions and
the security of the smart contracts code. We have made the code of our
smart contracts publicly available on GitHub.