Digital Twin Architecture and Standards
ingest is performed using create
operations and application access is
performed using read operations.
4. Applications within an ecosystem tier
subscribe to notification events
published when
digital twin
transactions occur, triggering actions
to retrieve and process the affected
content.
5. Digital twin contents are securely
synchronized in bulk between
connected tiers, using the network
bandwidth to its best advantage to
consolidate related content in
centralized storage without losing
ownership.
6. Authenticated users are authorized
by the owner to configure and
manage the digital twin properties
using a separate set of operations.
I NTRODUCTION
Digital Twins are key components in an
Industrial IoT (Internet of Things) ecosystem,
owned and managed by business
stakeholders to provide secure storage,
processing and sharing of data within an
architectural tier. Industrial IoT is an
integration exercise rather than a
development challenge, bringing many
vendors and technologies together. Digital
twins enable flexible configurations of
applications and data storage, especially to
integrate third parties. An architecture
based on digital twins is one alternative for
managing this complexity.
We propose six sets of operations to
characterize digital twin interactions within
the Industrial IoT ecosystem:
1. Digital twins are discoverable, can be
queried
to
determine
their
capabilities and composed to provide
industrial solutions.
2. An information model abstracts a
digital twin, with discoverable object
types that can be browsed by other
components
and
interactively,
supporting
underlying
data
repositories that evolve according to
real world lifecycles.
3. Key-value pairs are created, read,
updated and deleted in column
stores with possible configured side
effects that can modify or enhance
the value contents. Data source
IIC Journal of Innovation
An integrated information model, separate
from those representing each digital twin,
forms the basis for all interactions, including
design, orchestration, execution and
administration.
D IGITAL T WIN C APABILITIES
The Digital Twin concept first appeared for
industry in 2003. The meaning of the term
has evolved, and this powerful metaphor can
be extended to include a comprehensive set
of possible capabilities, as shown in Table 1.
These capabilities create value throughout
the lifecycle of industrial assets, as shown in
Table 2.
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