An Architecture for Composite Digital Twin Enabling Collaborative Digital Ecosystems

Abstract

The rapid acceleration of digitalization has intensified the focus on the use of Digital Twin (DT) across industries. While the concept of DT is not new in itself, the large-scale adoption across the industries is still maturing. The number of DTs deployed will continue to increase significantly <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">1</sup> and will represent components, systems, interactions, people, and even business processes. This will drive the need to connect multiple DTs that can operate seamlessly across systems and business boundaries, forming a collaborative digital ecosystem. The term Composite Digital Twin (CDT) is used to represent this interconnection and integration of DTs. To implement a CDT, several challenges such as trust, interoperability, governance, ownership, security, and privacy need to be addressed. First, this study explores the requirements to create a CDT covering operational, management, and security standpoints. After analyzing CDT requirements, an architecture is proposed to encapsulate the core functional and security requirements to enable emerging collaborative digital ecosystems. The architecture emphasis is placed on security and trust among participants to ensure that developers, providers, and users can have confidence in the services these CDT provide.