Cyber-Physical systems (CPS) have complex lifecycles involving multiple stakeholders, and the transparency of both hardware and software components' supply chain is opaque at best. This raises concerns for stakeholders who may not trust that what they receive is what was requested. There is an opportunity to build a cyberphysical titling process offering universal traceability and the ability to differentiate systems based on provenance. Today, RFID tags and barcodes address some of these needs, though they are easily manipulated due to non-linkage with an object or system's intrinsic characteristics. We propose cyberphysical sequencing as a low-cost, light-weight and pervasive means of adding track-and-trace capabilities to any asset that ties a system's physical identity to a unique and invariant digital identifier. CPS sequencing offers benefits similar Digital Twins' for identifying and managing the provenance and identity of an asset throughout its life with far fewer computational and other resources.
KeywordsDistributed Computing • Computerized instrumentation • Internet of Things • Supply chain management • Security and Privacy • Manufacturing 1 Why Pervasive Digital Traceability (PDT)?Across domains, manufactured and assembled system complexity is increasing. Constituent components require compliance with stringent specifications, must have low defect rates, and increasingly require known provenance relating to origin and interaction histories. At the same time, economic and other constraints affecting production and assembly may necessitate involving diverse and untrusted vendors: a vehicle's parts may be made abroad and assembled domestically, while a medication might be compounded in one country before being shipped to another for packaging and a third for distribution. Power generation plant components might be manufactured globally but require certification in the country of use, while electronics manufacturing for a globally-distributed device may require trust-related integrated circuits to be provided and validated by a single-source vendor.Diverse and distributed supply chains invite substantial risk of counterfeit, compromise, or non-compliance. Providing insight into component origin, provisioning and life before assembly has the potential to make resulting systems more robust, resilient, and broadly usable than is feasible today. Consistent validation of the trusted identity and integrity of a system is necessary to support system tracking, supervision, management, and transferrability to mitigate this risk, particularly for critical applications.Asset supervision may be simple: high assurance systems like space vehicles have robust, metadata-abundant supply chains. In other cases, system, sub-assembly, and component mapping is more difficult. Assembled automobiles, for example, belong to a global registry for Vehicle Identification Numbers that supports asset supervision and management