Digital Twin Architecture and Standards
Cloud Data Center
Regional Data Center
Plant Data Center
DCS
Data Logger
Temperature
Pressure
Gateway Historian
IIoT Device Process Tag
Figure 1: Industrial IoT Tiers
I NDUSTRIAL C HALLENGES
Communication between layers are
interactions
between
architectural
components, where some if not all the
elements are digital twins. Digital twin
interoperability standards could be used
instead of proprietary protocols to reduce
the complexity and cost of integrating
different vendor solutions together.
The Industrial IoT market is targeted to grow
by trillions of US dollars by the year 2030 3 ,
driven by adoption, deployment and
integration of billions of intelligent devices
and their associated data. The devices can
talk directly to one another when possible
and handle much of their own
computational tasks. 4 Edge computing
provides elastic resources and services,
while cloud computing supports workflows
distributed in the production network. 5 This
digital expansion faces several significant
challenges,
including
reliable
data
management, security and privacy.
There is limited scope of data in the lower
layers and the co-located services have
shortened latencies when interacting with
industrial processes. In the supporting layers
there can be multiple data centers, one for
each vendor, and regional tiers may be
required due to country-specific regulations
for data sharing cloud-to-cloud. Plant tiers
occur naturally from legacy operational
technology deployments, and device tiers
arise as embedded computers expand their
storage capacity and processing power.
Aggregating all the raw data to a single data
center before performing analysis increases
response times, raising performance
concerns in traditional industrial markets
and requiring architectural tradeoffs. Low
cost sensors and ubiquitous networking are
3
Purdy, M. Davarzani, L. 2015. The Growth Game-Changer: How the Industrial Internet of Things can drive progress and
prosperity. White Paper. Accenture Strategy.
4
Froehlich, A. 2014. IoT: Out of the Cloud & Into the Fog. Blog Post. Information Week / Network Computing.
5
Yi, S., Li, C. and Li, Q. 2015. A Survey of Fog Computing: Concepts, Applications and Issues. In Proceedings of the 2015 Workshop
on Mobile Big Data (Hangzhou, China, June 22 – 25, 2015). Mobidata ’15. ACM, New York, NY, 37-42. DOI=
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2757384.2757397.
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