Open Source Drives Digital Twin Adoption
provided a definition of this concept ; likewise , a definition is provided by the Digital Twin Consortium ( DTC ) 10 . Followed by the definition , various architectural aspects that must be considered in the design of Digital Twin have been proposed 11 . These include , for example , information models , APIs , connectivity to physical twins , data ingestion mechanisms , security and interoperability of Digital Twins . Other organizations , such as the Open Industry 4.0 Alliance 12 , focused on creating a network of manufacturers to drive industries into adopting the Digital Twin technologies of Industry 4.0 based on existing definitions and standards .
Each vendor may offer its proprietary Digital Twin solution . However , systems of systems , or , in general , complex systems , consist of components offered by different vendors . Therefore , individual Digital Twins need to eventually interact towards forming system-level Digital Twins and / or to enable cross-vendor interactions . Consequently , interoperability of Digital Twins ( e . g ., their meta model and APIs ) in complex systems becomes inevitable .
To accelerate the development of Digital Twins within or across companies , there is an inevitable need for open standards for Digital Twins , as well as Open Source implementations to promote the agile development and adoption of those standards 13 14 15 . Alongside the IIC and Plattform Industrie 4.0 , as the importance of this topic has grown , multiple new organizations such as DTC , Industrial Digital Twin Association ( IDTA ), and Open Manufacturing Platform ( OMP ) have recently been founded to develop these topics further .
This paper elaborates on the challenges in adopting the Digital Twin concept in practice and the motivations for having open standards and Open Source activities to address these challenges . In addition , the paper provides an overview of the activities of some organizations around these topics in more details . We discuss the challenges that will arise if there will be multiple open standards and Open Source implementations of Digital Twins .
10 https :// www . digitaltwinconsortium . org
11
Industrial Internet Consortium , “ Digital Twins for Industrial Applications White Paper ”, https :// hub . iiconsortium . org / portal / Whitepapers / 5e95c68a34c8fe0012e7d91b
12 https :// openindustry4 . com
13 https :// www . din . de / resource / blob / 65354 / 619baa1958b89b8a7b6cd9be2b79f223 / roadmap-i4-0-edata . pdf
14 https :// www . ietfjournal . org / open-standards-open-source-open-loop /
15 https :// www . ietfjournal . org / three-years-on-open-standards-open-source-open-loop /
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