Decentralised Blockchain Management Through Digital Twins
Georgios Diamantopoulos, Nikos Tziritas, Rami Bahsoon, Georgios Theodoropoulos
TL;DR
This paper tackles the tension between decentralisation and dynamic governance in blockchain systems. It proposes a digital-twin-based management framework in which multiple stakeholder-controlled twins form a secondary management blockchain to decide on and propagate configuration changes to the primary blockchain. The management blockchain uses a PBFT-like consensus with deterministic Tendermint-style proposer selection to generate configuration blocks that are verifiably linked to the primary chain, and primary nodes act as observers to apply approved configurations. Experiments via simulation show fast agreement on decisions and only modest overhead when reconfiguring the primary blockchain, supporting practical deployment in permissioned or consortium settings.
Abstract
The necessity of blockchain systems to remain decentralised limits current solutions to blockchain governance and dynamic management, forcing a trade-off between control and decentralisation. In light of the above, this work proposes a dynamic and decentralised blockchain management mechanism based on digital twins. To ensure decentralisation, the proposed mechanism utilises multiple digital twins that the system's stakeholders control. To facilitate decentralised decision-making, the twins are organised in a secondary blockchain system that orchestrates agreement on, and propagation of decisions to the managed blockchain. This enables the management of blockchain systems without centralised control. A preliminary evaluation of the performance and impact of the overheads introduced by the proposed mechanism is conducted through simulation. The results demonstrate the proposed mechanism's ability to reach consensus on decisions quickly and reconfigure the primary blockchain with minimal overhead.