The Role of Digital Twins in Collaborative Cyber-Physical Systems

Abstract

The growing smartification of devices and systems, combining physical and virtual parts, offers a great potential to improve the daily life of people through the establishment of context-rich environments. Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), embedding collaborative features, can be considered as one of the key enablers of such environments, providing support for life quality improvement. Besides the general aim of the conventional CPS, further aspects related to co-existence and collaboration among different heterogeneous and autonomous components within a system, are in the scope of Collaborative CPS. These systems allow looking at the technical and organisational challenges from the perspective of interconnected and jointly acting entities. Such entities can be the physical devices or their virtual representations, which are called Digital Twins (DT), understood as digital replicas of physical assets. However, a DT provides more than just a digital simulation of the physical device or process, including reasoning and prediction mechanisms. This work is devoted to the discussion of how Digital Twins can be used in the design, development, and functioning of Collaborative CPS. As such, a design approach is suggested and illustrated with a smart home scenario.