A Triple Human-Digital Twin Architecture for Cyber-Physical Systems

Abstract

With the development of information and communication technology and the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) era, cyber-physical system (CPS) is becoming the trend of products or systems. The deep integration and real-time interaction between the physical world and the virtual world expand system functions. Although there are some CPS implementation guidelines, the virtual world is still relatively abstract compared to the concrete physical world that can be touched through the IoT. Besides that, human is a non-negligible CPS endogenous interactive intelligent component. In this paper, we propose a triple human-digital twin architecture, where the physical objects and the digital twins that are the projections of the physical entities establish the cornerstone of human functioning together. And the hierarchically distributed digital twins grow dynamically with the physical entities along the lifecycle. Furthermore, the interaction and collaboration among the physical objects, the digital twins, and the humans in their respective worlds (the expected world, the interpreted world, and the physical world) integrate the full value chain of the products in anticipation of seamless synergy. Finally, we present a power management digital companion platform for the lunar probe to demonstrate the efficacy of the architecture.