Digital Immunity for the U.S. Supply Chain: Preventing Data Loss in Moving Vehicles

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

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.

Evaluation

Results are from representative prototype/simulation disruption scenarios including 2-hour blackout, edge power loss, interrupted upload, severe event reordering, and forced digital-twin divergence.

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.