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Towards Federated Digital Twin Platforms

Mirgita Frasheri, Prasad Talasila, Vanessa Scherma

TL;DR

The paper addresses the challenge of scalable, collaborative development and management of Digital Twins across distributed teams and platforms. It extends the Digital Twin as a Service (DTaaS) platform with federated capabilities, enabling asset discovery, reuse, reconfiguration, and modification across multiple DTaaS instances via GitLab DevOps integration. The work describes the architecture, asset lifecycle, private/common assets, and cross-instance collaboration, including configuration of multiple GitLab backends and support for various execution environments and DevOps workflows. This federated approach enables scalable, reusable DT development across organizations, facilitating cross-institution collaboration and more efficient deployment and maintenance of DT-enabled systems.

Abstract

Digital Twin (DT) technology has become rather popular in recent years, promising to optimize production processes, manage the operation of cyber-physical systems, with an impact spanning across multiple application domains (e.g., manufacturing, robotics, space etc.). DTs can include different kinds of assets, e.g., models, data, which could potentially be reused across DT projects by multiple users, directly affecting development costs, as well as enabling collaboration and further development of these assets. To provide user support for these purposes, dedicated DT frameworks and platforms are required, that take into account user needs, providing the infrastructure and building blocks for DT development and management. In this demo paper, we show how the DT as a Service (DTaaS) platform has been extended to enable a federated approach to DT development and management, that allows multiple users across multiple instances of DTaaS to discover, reuse, reconfigure, and modify existing DT assets.

Towards Federated Digital Twin Platforms

TL;DR

The paper addresses the challenge of scalable, collaborative development and management of Digital Twins across distributed teams and platforms. It extends the Digital Twin as a Service (DTaaS) platform with federated capabilities, enabling asset discovery, reuse, reconfiguration, and modification across multiple DTaaS instances via GitLab DevOps integration. The work describes the architecture, asset lifecycle, private/common assets, and cross-instance collaboration, including configuration of multiple GitLab backends and support for various execution environments and DevOps workflows. This federated approach enables scalable, reusable DT development across organizations, facilitating cross-institution collaboration and more efficient deployment and maintenance of DT-enabled systems.

Abstract

Digital Twin (DT) technology has become rather popular in recent years, promising to optimize production processes, manage the operation of cyber-physical systems, with an impact spanning across multiple application domains (e.g., manufacturing, robotics, space etc.). DTs can include different kinds of assets, e.g., models, data, which could potentially be reused across DT projects by multiple users, directly affecting development costs, as well as enabling collaboration and further development of these assets. To provide user support for these purposes, dedicated DT frameworks and platforms are required, that take into account user needs, providing the infrastructure and building blocks for DT development and management. In this demo paper, we show how the DT as a Service (DTaaS) platform has been extended to enable a federated approach to DT development and management, that allows multiple users across multiple instances of DTaaS to discover, reuse, reconfigure, and modify existing DT assets.
Paper Structure (7 sections, 4 figures)

This paper contains 7 sections, 4 figures.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. DTaaS Platform Overview
  3. User Needs & Requirements
  4. Federated Digital Twins
  5. DevOps on Digital Twin Platforms
  6. Related Work
  7. Conlusions

Figures (4)

  • Figure 1: DT life-cycle phases. Dashed arrows indicate possible actions, whereas solid arrows indicate the taken action.
  • Figure 2: Collaboration across multiple DTaaS installations. The link from a DTaaS instance to Gitlab backend is configurable thus extending the collaboration across multiple DTaaS instances.
  • Figure 3: The layered architecture of the Digital Twin as a Service (DTaaS) and its dependence on Gitlab. The interaction uses Gitlab API.
  • Figure 4: Snapshots of two DTaaS instances using a common Gitlab DevOps infrastructure.