Accurate and Efficient Digital Twin Construction Using Concurrent End-to-End Synchronization and Multi-Attribute Data Resampling

Accurate and efficient digital twin construction through real-time multi-attribute sensing and remote concurrent data analysis is essential in supporting complex connected industrial applications. Given the unsynchronized nature and heterogeneous sampling rates of distributed sensing processes, the varying time misalignment among different attributes will inevitably deteriorate the remote correlation analysis and digital twin construction. Furthermore, application-agnostic digital twin construction approaches could potentially involve high communication and computation overhead for comprehensive digital twin construction. In this article, a concurrent end-to-end time synchronization and multi-attribute data resampling scheme is proposed to enable accurate and efficient digital twin construction at the remote end. Specifically, digital clocks are concurrently established at the remote end, with each of them associated with a sampling rate of a unique sensing attribute. To tackle the temporal misalignment among multiple sensing attributes, raw data are accurately resampled according to the same reference frequency, with attribute-specific synchronized digital clocks providing cohesively aligned time information. An edge-centric platform is established to efficiently guide the multidimensional data processing during digital twin construction. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can achieve more accurate and efficient digital twin construction than existing modeling methods. In the end, the digital twin-driven predictive maintenance is presented as a case study, aiming at illustrating the potential applications and benefits expected of the proposed scheme in industrial environments.