Digital Twin in Industrial Application – Requirements to a Comprehensive Data Model
these meta-models in practice, we believe it
is necessary to further concretize them by
defining relevant content, granularity und
correlations between them. In our opinion,
this is only possible with reference to the use
cases for digital twins. Abstracting these use
cases would then permit the generic
matching of “use case types” and data model
characteristics.
I NTRODUCTION
The concept of the digital twin is central to
the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). In
order to make its application effective,
various organizations are undertaking
standardization efforts—for example in the
form of the Industry 4.0 Initiative 1 and, of
course, the Industrial Internet Consortium
(IIC) 2 . In our opinion, it is crucial that such
standardized digital twin concepts meet the
following requirements:
Furthermore, suitable transport media
(protocols) must be selected and
implemented. Instead of vendor-specific ap-
proaches (of the sort already available in the
market), we strongly support the idea of an
open-source solution. We regard this as the
approach most likely to avoid any kind of
“vendor lock-in.”
A common understanding of the
granularity and significance of the
contents of the digital twin is
necessary in order to enable the joint
monitoring of different assets.
To create the digital twin of an end
product, it must be possible to
consolidate the various submodels
from the supply chain and the
different product components.
Digital twins must be portable
between systems in order to
guarantee the independence of the
operating companies—as is the case,
for example, in various engineering
fields thanks to the use of the STEP
format.
The contents and correlations presented in
this paper are based on business cases and
were obtained using our IIoT platform
CONTACT Elements for IoT. Our assessments
regarding relevance and feasibility are based
on the experiences we have gained.
Outline of this article
This paper proposes content characteristics
for digital twin data models that can be im-
plemented in existing concepts. To support
our proposals, we refer to various real-world
examples, requirements and use cases.
Corresponding data models are needed, and
some standardization initiatives have
already resulted in meta-models for digital
twins designed to address these
requirements. However, in order to use
We consequently take existing data models
for digital twins as the basis for a further-
reaching discussion in section 2. In section 3,
we then describe the business cases that
1
Plattform Industrie 4.0, ZVEI (eds.): Details of Asset Administration Shell. Specification Part 1 – The exchange of information
between partners in the value chain of industry 4.0 (version 1.0). Berlin Nov. 2018
2
Industrial Internet Consortium, Plattform Industrie 4.0 (eds.): Architecture Alignment and Interoperability. White paper. 2017
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November 2019