The authenticated data from smart contract and blockchain-enabled authentication scheme is used to design DT for simulating the attack detection operation in ZTN environment. In particular, the DT is set up with a range of process aware attack scenarios to provide a platform for study and the creation of Intrusion Detection System (IDS). To assess the proposed framework’s ability to identify attacks, a Self Attention-based Long Short Term Memory (SALSTM) network is deployed. Additionally, utilizing the SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) tool, the proposed AI-based IDS is made explainable.