Modeling and Synchronizing Digital Twin Environments

A digital twin is a virtual replica of a system defined at a certain level of fidelity and synchronized to a specific frequency. Digital twins are often used to replicate physical systems whose simulations are computationally expensive. If modeling the environment of any system is generally difficult, the problem is even harder in the case of digital twins, since the model of their environment must be synchronized with that of the physical system too. In this paper, we show how the environment of a digital twin can be effectively modeled and kept in sync with the real one, by adding digital proxies of the relevant elements of the environment to the models of the digital twin elements, and connecting them using the same synchronization mechanisms used by the twins. We demonstrate our approach with a case study of a smart room with sensors, using high-level software models.