Francis Bordeleau’s research while affiliated with Educational Testing Service and other places

Digital Twins are an emerging concept which is gaining importance in several fields. It refers to a comprehensive software representation of an actual system, which includes structures, properties, conditions, behaviours, history and possible futures of that system through models and data to be continuously synchronized. Digital Twins can be built for different purposes, such as for the design, development, analysis, simulation, and operations of non-digital systems in order to understand, monitor, and/or optimize the actual system. To realize Digital Twins, data and models originated from diverse engineering disciplines have to be integrated, synchronized, and managed to leverage the benefits provided by software (digital) technologies. However, properly arranging the different models, data sources, and their relations to engineer Digital Twins is challenging. We, therefore, propose a conceptual modeling framework for Digital Twins that captures the combined usage of heterogeneous models and their respective evolving data for the twin’s entire life-cycle.

Digital Twins have emerged since the beginning of this millennium to better support the management of systems based on (real-time) data collected in different parts of the operating systems. Digital Twins have been successfully used in many application domains, and thus, are considered as an important aspect of Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE). However, their development, maintenance, and evolution still face major challenges, in particular: (i) the management of heterogeneous models from different disciplines, (ii) the bi-directional synchronization of digital twins and the actual systems, and (iii) the support for collaborative development throughout the complete life-cycle. In the last decades, the Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) community has investigated these challenges in the context of software systems. Now the question arises, which results may be applicable for digital twin engineering as well.