Distributed digital twins on the open-source OpenTwins framework

Abstract

With the continuous evolution of digital twins, the requirements of interconnection and interoperability have led to the creation of the term Distributed Digital Twin, where commonly, different components of the same digital twin operate on different devices. This article addresses this new gap in the field by combining Digital Twins and Distributed systems technologies and introduces a re-definition of the architecture of OpenTwins, an open-source platform designed to develop generic next-gen 3D-IoT-AI-powered digital twins. This approach enables the distribution of digital twins across different infrastructures by seamlessly integrating multiple instances of OpenTwins working together. Distributing Digital Twins across networks and devices can offer dynamic and collaborative simulations, artificial intelligence techniques, yet poses synchronization and scalability challenges. The platform re-definition involves the definition of a lightweight, synchronized, and distributed version of the original OpenTwins architecture to tackle these issues. As the field of digital twins is closely linked to the Internet of Things environment and Industry 4.0, this architecture has been designed to be compatible in IoT devices, being compatible with ARM architectures, consuming fewer resources than the original platform as it has fewer components, thus reducing the number of messages and the bandwidth consumed.