Digital Twin Architecture and Standards
increase the timeliness of analytics. 8 One
approach is to establish a compromise
between data duplication and the
performance cost of update and select
queries. 9
D IGITAL T WIN S TANDARDS We encourage industry to support these
formal activities and to develop inputs for
standardization. Our work identifies six
architectural interactions for digital twins to
support the common operations proposed in
the Introduction above, as conceptualized
by the central diagram in Figure 2 below.
The
International
Organization
for
Standardization (ISO) covers industrial data
in TC 184 SC 4. 10 The standard for a Digital
Twin Manufacturing Network is currently
under development. 11 For the Joint
Technical Committee (JTC 1) that includes
ISO and the International Electrotechnical
Commission (IEC), an established Joint
Advisory Group (JAG) on Emerging
Technology and Innovation (JETI) published
their Technology Trend Report 12 and
identified Digital Twin as one of four top
emerging technologies out of fifteen. The
report has led to formation of the Digital
Twin Advisory Group (AG 11) who provide
recommendations to JTC 1. For example, standards could define
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)
for digital twin data access to securely and
reliably store, manage and retrieve records.
The digital twin architecture context
delineates a security domain to control
access and restrict operations to authorized
clients. Clients must authenticate using
security best practices, perhaps facilitated
by federated identity. Authorized clients
exchange key-value pairs with a digital twin
using CRUD (Create, Read, Update and
Delete). Values can be simple or structured
(object) types. Some implementations may
restrict updates and deletes to support data
consistency goals.
8
Pu, Q., Ananthanarayanan, G., Bodik, P., Kandula, S., Akella, A., Bahl, P. and Stoica, 2015. Low Latency Geo-Distributed Data
Analytics. In Proceedings of the 2015 ACM Conference on Special Interest Group on Data Communication (London, August 17 –
21, 2015). SIGCOMM ‘15. ACM, New York, NY, 421-434. DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2785956.2787505.
9
Hassen, F. and Touzi, A.G. 2015. Towards a New Architecture for the Description and Manipulation of Large Distributed Data.
Big Data in Complex Systems, DOI= http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11056-1_17.
10 Industrial Data: https://www.iso.org/committee/54158.html
11 Digital Twin Manufacturing Framework: https://www.iso.org/standard/75066.html
12 JETI: https://jtc1info.org/technology/jeti/
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November 2019