Digital Twins: A Meta-Review on Their Conceptualization, Application, and Reference Architecture

The interdisciplinary development of smart factories and cyber-physical systems CPS shows the weaknesses of classical development methods. For example, the communication of the interdisciplinary participants in the development process of CPS is difficult due to a lack of cross-domain language comprehension. At the same time, the functional complexity of the systems to be developed increases and they act operationally as independent CPSs. And it is not only the product that needs to be developed, but also the manufacturing processes are complex. The use of graph-based design languages offers a technical solution to these challenges. The UML-based structures offer a cross-domain language understanding for all those involved in the interdisciplinary development process. Simulations are required for the rapid and successful development of new products. Depending on the functional scope, graphical simulations of the production equipment are used to simulate the manufacturing processes as a digital factory or a virtual commissioning simulation. Due to the high number of functional changes during the development process, it makes sense to automatically generate the simulation modelling as digital twins of the products or means of production from the graph-based design languages. The paper describes how digital twins are automatically generated using AutomationML according to the Reference Architecture Model Industry 4.0 (RAMI 4.0) or the Industrial Internet Reference Architecture (IIRA).

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Generic Digital Twin Architecture for Industrial Energy Systems

Applied Sciences ◽

10.3390/app10248903 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 10 (24) ◽

pp. 8903

Author(s):

Gernot Steindl ◽

Martin Stagl ◽

Lukas Kasper ◽

Wolfgang Kastner ◽

Rene Hofmann

Keyword(s):

Industry 4.0 ◽

Energy Systems ◽

Energy Transition ◽

Packed Bed ◽

Reference Architecture ◽

Semantic Web Technologies ◽

Architecture Model ◽

Digital Twin ◽

Digital Twins ◽

Industrial Energy

Digital Twins have been in the focus of research in recent years, trying to achieve the vision of Industry 4.0. In the domain of industrial energy systems, they are applied to facilitate a flexible and optimized operation. With the help of Digital Twins, the industry can participate even stronger in the ongoing renewable energy transition. Current Digital Twin implementations are often application-specific solutions without general architectural concepts and their structures and namings differ, although the basic concepts are quite similar. For this reason, we analyzed concepts, architectures, and frameworks for Digital Twins in the literature to develop a technology-independent Generic Digital Twin Architecture (GDTA), which is aligned with the information technology layers of the Reference Architecture Model Industry 4.0 (RAMI4.0). This alignment facilitates a common naming and understanding of the proposed architectural structure. A proof-of-concept shows the application of Semantic Web technologies for instantiating the proposed GDTA for a use case of a Packed-Bed Thermal Energy Storage (PBTES).

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Towards a Reference Architecture for Leveraging Model Repositories for Digital Twins

2020 25th IEEE International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation (ETFA) ◽

10.1109/etfa46521.2020.9212109 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Daniel Lehner ◽

Sabine Wolny ◽

Alexandra Mazak-Huemer ◽

Manuel Wimmer

Keyword(s):

Reference Architecture ◽

Digital Twins

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Architecture Models to Facilitate Communication of Clinical Information

Methods of Information in Medicine ◽

10.1055/s-0038-1634410 ◽

1999 ◽

Vol 38 (04/05) ◽

pp. 326-331

Author(s):

S. Kay

Keyword(s):

Health Care ◽

Clinical Information ◽

Reference Architecture ◽

Context Model ◽

Electronic Health

AbstractThis is an account of the development and use of a context model for facilitating the communication of clinical information. Its function is to articulate the principle of context within a reference architecture for the Electronic Health Care Record (EHCR). The work required a re-examination of established models of communication, the purpose being to use them to support an architecture that could be reasonably expected to accommodate future, and by definition unforeseeable, developments in EHCR communication. The Context Model is built upon seven recognized constituents of communication. These constituents, although having their origin in the engineering of signal communication, have been found to be useful for explication both in the verbal and textual communication of narratives between people. The electronic health care record architecture supported by the model is the European prestandard ENV13606-1.

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