Modeling and validating temporal rules with semantic Petri net for digital twins

Abstract

The semantic web has become an important resource of domain knowledge in the construction industry, and there is a need to model the temporal states and check the transition rules of digital twins in the semantic web. Related studies have added timestamps to describe an RDF graph that varies in time, but digital twin applications require a formal representation of the temporal states and transition rules other than simple timestamps. Related studies also focused on the interaction between temporal and semantic models, but there are still challenges in the two-way sharing of knowledge in the runtime of the temporal model. In this paper, the Semantic Petri Net (SPN) is proposed as a method to represent the temporal states and rules in RDF and SPARQL so that a runnable temporal model can be implemented on a common SPARQL engine, and the state change rules can be checked with access to the rich domain knowledge provided by the semantic web. An application case is presented for modeling and simulating the constraints in the process of a construction project.