Digital Immunity for the U.S. Supply Chain

Overview

Moving assets across trucking, rail, maritime, and defense-adjacent logistics generate operational data used for safety, compliance, predictive maintenance, warranty evidence, and fleet coordination. Preserving this data history is essential for trustworthy decision-making.

Problem

Mobile IoT systems frequently face:

Intermittent and asymmetric connectivity
Power cycling and edge restarts
Partial or out-of-order uploads
Clock drift and temporal misalignment
Silent data loss discovered after downstream analysis

Core Idea

Digital Immunity is defined here as the ability to preserve integrity, completeness, and recoverability of edge-generated operational data despite mobility-induced disruption.

Key Properties

P1 Data survivability
P2 Temporal integrity
P3 Causal consistency
P4 Replay safety
P5 Bounded inconsistency

Why This Is Different from Traditional Reliability

Traditional IoT reliability often emphasizes eventual delivery.
Digital Immunity emphasizes reconstructable history.

The architecture prioritizes:

Durable persistence at creation time
Immutable event history as primary truth
Replay-aware ingestion
Durable checkpoints
Deterministic twin reconciliation

Reference Architecture

1) Vehicle Edge Layer

Durable capture, local buffering, and resilient event checkpointing.

2) In-Transit Connectivity Layer

Adaptive transfer across variable network quality and blackout periods.

3) Cloud Ingestion and Event Backbone

Replay-aware, idempotent processing with lineage preservation.

4) Digital Twin Reconciliation Layer

Gap detection, deterministic replay, and twin-state convergence.

Data Protection Mechanisms

Persistent store-forward-replay
Event immutability and lineage tracking
Checkpointing and durable acknowledgment
Replay-aware idempotent ingestion
Twin gap detection and deterministic reconciliation

Evaluation

Representative prototype/simulation disruption scenarios include:

2-hour blackout
Edge power loss
Interrupted upload
Severe event reordering
Forced digital-twin divergence

Reported outcomes:

0 events lost across representative scenarios
100% recovery completeness
Convergence range approximately 2.1 to 4.4 minutes by scenario

These are representative prototype/simulation results and should be interpreted as architectural validation under controlled conditions.

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Conclusion

Digital Immunity reframes resilience from connectivity restoration to provable continuity of operational history. This research contribution shows architectural feasibility and identifies a strong basis for future validation in broader real-world logistics environments.