Integration challenges for digital twin systems-of-systems
Judith Michael, Jérôme Pfeiffer, Bernhard Rumpe⋆, Andreas Wortmann
Abstract
Research and industry leverage digital twins to monitor and control (cyber-physical) systems in various domains. For their efficient engineering, these twins need to become Systems-of-Systems (SoS), in which digital twins of smaller systems (e.g., a production machine) become parts of digital twins of larger systems (e.g., a factory). Yet, research on digital twins as SoS largely ignores reusing digital twins in SoS. Based on our experience in engineering digital twins with experts from various domains related to production systems engineering, we present insights on the challenges of composing and integrating that need to be addressed for efficient engineering of digital twins as SoS. These insights may guide future research on engineering digital twins as well as practitioners considering the challenges in building and composing digital twin systems-of-systems.