A Connectivity-Resilient Blockchain Architecture for Digital Twin in Bangladesh RMG

Abstract

Bangladesh's ready-made garment (RMG) sector generates more than 80% of national export earnings, yet real-time production monitoring has gained almost no foothold on its factory floors. This paper combines two bodies of evidence. Documentary analysis of the Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association's digital programme, covering DigiProd Pass, the Digital Factory Passport and AWARE, shows that these are compliance instruments built around European Digital Product Passport requirements rather than around the cost, connectivity and skill constraints that keep factories from adopting production-monitoring technology. A targeted survey of 61 practitioners then tested whether those constraints are recognised at the production level. Respondents rated skilled-personnel shortage, initial cost and interruption of network and electricity supply as substantial obstacles, and a Friedman test found no reliable severity ordering among the five barrier items, so they are treated as a joint constraint set rather than ranked. The strongest inferential result is that the skills barrier was rated well above respondents' assessment of their own factories' capacity to absorb minimal-training systems. Perceived monitoring value and system acceptability were positively associated. From this evidence the paper derives design requirements and specifies a connectivity-resilient edge-gateway architecture using RFID or QR capture, a permissioned Hyperledger Fabric ledger with private data collections, and an offline-first store-and-forward layer. At the level specified the system is a digital shadow rather than a closed-loop digital twin, and it has not been prototyped.