From Multiple Digital Twins to a Multi-Faceted Digital Twin: Towards an AAS-Based Approach

Digital Twin, the technological advance that has emerged in the Industry 4.0 era, will become one of the six technological pillars forming Industry 5.0, according to the vision of the European Commission. This promotion relies on the fact that digital-twin technologies are getting more mature and widely adopted in both the public and private sectors. Besides the progressions, a new challenge has arisen: harmonizing multiple digital twins in a single digital twin system. Indeed, digital twins built on different technologies addressing different aspects of an asset are not interoperable by default, making the interaction between them uneasy. Moreover, as an asset must have a connection with each digital twin for data exchange, its multiple connections with multiple digital twins may cause the asset itself and the involved network infrastructures to be overloaded. Regarding the above challenge, this paper proposes an approach based on the Asset Administration Shell (AAS) standard to harmonize multiple digital twins as a single digital twin with multiple facets.