Digital Twin in Industrial Application – Requirements to a Comprehensive Data Model
terms of low waste or low levels of manual
interventions.
A suitable candidate for implementing an
environment for digital twin data models 8 is
the Eclipse Ditto project. As members of the
Eclipse IoT working group ourselves, we con-
sider the Eclipse foundation to have a strong
reputation and a substantial working com-
munity that will be able to ensure the lasting
and reliable introduction of a comprehen-
sive digital twin model into the IIoT commu-
nity.
Ditto 9 is an implementation of a fundamen-
tal data model and consists of an API that
supports connectivity via protocols like
MQTT. The central object in the data model
is a thing that can be described in terms of
attributes and extended by a number of fea-
tures describing data and functionality re-
lated to the asset (see Figure 4). The imple-
mentation also includes revision information
on changes to the digital twin.
Figure 4: Example of a JSON representation of the Eclipse
Ditto data model (Ditto release notes)
CONTACT Software will work on example in-
terfaces and payload examples for Ditto in
order to describe our requirements for digi-
tal twin data models.
O UTLOOK : A RRANGING M ODEL
C ONTENTS BY U SE C ASE
Establishing a technical option for exchang-
ing digital twins is only a first step towards a
comprehensive data model: a technical for-
mat does not answer questions about which
model contents are appropriate, in particu-
lar in terms of references, data and granular-
ity. To make it easier to distribute digital twin
data models within the supply chain, it is
8
Roest, M.: An open source platform for digital twins? (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/open-source-platform-digital-twins-
mark-roest), visited 10 September 2019
9
Eclipse Ditto: Release Notes Version 0.9.0., released on July 10., 2019 (https://www.eclipse.org/ditto/release_notes_090.html)
IIC Journal of Innovation
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