Open Source Drives Digital Twin Adoption
IDTA , DTC , GAIA-X , CESMII are publishing the outcomes of their activities in repositories that are open for the community . In particular , their codes are available in repositories such as GitHub with the corresponding Open Source Licenses ( e . g . Apache v . 2.0 , Eclipse v2.0 , Mozilla Public License ( MPL ), MIT ). Additionally , organizations such as OMP , IDTA , GAIA-X , CESMII are also “ open sourcing ” their specifications . Both lead to an open development where the community can both access the codes or the specifications and provide feedbacks on them as well . Furthermore , if the Open Source license allows , they can use , modify and share their contributions .
Organizations such as OMP , IDTA and DTC have recognized that the Open Source development model provides additional capabilities to simplify and to accelerate the specification and standardization process of new technologies . The Open Source model adds agility , quicker cycles of evolution and open collaboration , and vendor-neutral governance to the development of standards . In particular , as more information and communication technologies are embedded into products ( e . g ., industrial machines and parts ), the demand for software and communication protocols are increasing . The concept of Digital Twin represents a suitable example of this paradigm shift and , accordingly , the concurrent development of standards and code via the Open Source model is a perfect match . Other technologies , such as Cloud Computing , already have proven that Open Source played an essential role in their successful adoption ( e . g . Cloud Foundry 38 , Kubernetes 39 , Gardener 40 ) in the market .
The Open Source activities of DTC and IDTA will provide valuable contribution via reference implementations for existing use cases and standards defining Digital Twins . As shown in Figure 1 , the Open Source implementations will provide a validation platform to test and to optimize respective standards and specifications . Especially , the Open Source community can provide direct feedback to the projects and new requirements as well as improvement suggestions by creating issues or pull requests in the corresponding repositories . For example , Plattform Industrie 4.0 has published several documents specifying the details of Asset Administration Shell and submodel templates that can be used as a reference for other organizations in their activities in the last few years and is continuing to do so . At the same time , these organizations could contribute to the newer versions of these documents based on their knowledge gained through the activities around Open Source projects or transferring the Asset Administration Shell specifications and Open Source codes to other applications beyond manufacturing . While IDTA is focusing on manufacturing applications of Digital Twins and has already decided which standard to use as basis for further development and improvement , DTC is looking across
38 https :// www . cloudfoundry . org
39 https :// kubernetes . io
40 https :// gardener . cloud
- 30 - March 2021