Equal-Term Exchange Mechanisms for Industrial Digital Twins and Tokenized Manufacturing Assets
Main article
Abstract
Industrial digital twins increasingly operate as exchangeable data-rich representations of machines, production cells, maintenance histories, carbon attributes, warranty rights, and cyber-physical control permissions. When such twins are tokenized as manufacturing assets, exchange is no longer a simple transfer of an indivisible item; each asset carries restrictions concerning maintenance obligations, compliance status, access rights, data confidentiality, and sustainability claims. This paper develops an equal-term exchange mechanism for tokenized manufacturing assets by adapting contract-constrained exchange logic to the industrial digital twin setting. The proposed Equal-Term Asset Cycle mechanism clears only term-homogeneous exchange loops, ensuring that the contractual term under which a participant receives a digital twin asset is consistent with the term under which its own asset is released. The framework formalizes four industrial term categories: unrestricted operational tokens, maintenance-locked tokens, compliance-locked tokens, and sustainability-locked tokens. A platform architecture is proposed that connects asset administration metadata, digital twin state streams, preference submission, smart-contract validation, and auditable cycle clearing. A simulation study using 2,400 synthetic exchange markets evaluates the proposed mechanism against unrestricted, greedy, and compliance-first baselines. Results show that the proposed mechanism eliminates term violations while retaining 94.7% of the welfare produced by unrestricted clearing and improving the cleared-trade ratio by 32-44% over simpler equal-term baselines. The study contributes to industrial convergence research by showing how mechanism design, blockchain governance, and digital twin architecture can be integrated to support trustworthy asset exchange in Industry 4.0 manufacturing ecosystems.
