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Understanding Digital Twins for Cyber-Physical Systems: A Conceptual Model

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Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation: Tools and Trends (ISoLA 2020)

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Abstract

Digital Twins (DTs) are revolutionizing Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) in many ways, including their development and operation. The significant interest of industry and academia in DTs has led to various definitions of DTs and related concepts, as seen in many recently published papers. Thus, there is a need for precisely defining different DT concepts and their relationships. To this end, we present a conceptual model that captures various DT concepts and their relationships, some of which are from the published literature, to provide a unified understanding of these concepts in the context of CPSs. The conceptual model is implemented as a set of Unified Modeling Language (UML) class diagrams and the concepts in the conceptual model are explained with a running example of an automated warehouse case study from published literature and based on the authors’ experience of working with the real CPS case study in previous projects.

The work is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 61872182. The work is also partially supported by the Co-evolver project (No. 286898/F20) funded by the Research Council of Norway under the FRIPRO program. Paolo Arcaini is supported by ERATO HASUO Metamathematics for Systems Design Project (No. JPMJER1603), JST; Funding Reference number: 10.13039/501100009024 ERATO.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://euroocs.eu/funding-opportunities/eu-fet-proact-eic-07-2020-digital-twins-for-the-life-sciences/.

  2. 2.

    https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/destination-earth-destine/.

  3. 3.

    https://www.ansys.com/products/systems/digital-twin.

  4. 4.

    https://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/global/en/our-story/glossary/digital-twin/24465.

  5. 5.

    https://www.ge.com/digital/applications/digital-twin.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, China

    Tao Yue

  2. Simula Research Laboratory, Oslo, Norway

    Tao Yue & Shaukat Ali

  3. National Institute of Informatics, Tokyo, Japan

    Paolo Arcaini

Authors
  1. Tao Yue
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  2. Paolo Arcaini
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  3. Shaukat Ali
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Tao Yue , Paolo Arcaini or Shaukat Ali .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Limerick and Lero, Limerick, Ireland

    Tiziana Margaria

  2. TU Dortmund, Dortmund, Germany

    Bernhard Steffen

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Yue, T., Arcaini, P., Ali, S. (2021). Understanding Digital Twins for Cyber-Physical Systems: A Conceptual Model. In: Margaria, T., Steffen, B. (eds) Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation: Tools and Trends. ISoLA 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12479. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83723-5_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83723-5_5

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