A Cloud-Edge Collaboration Framework for Generating Process Digital Twin

Tracking the process of remote task execution is critical to timely process analysis by collecting the evidence of correct execution or failure, which generates a process digital twin (DT) for remote supervision. Generally, it will encounter the challenge of constrained communication, high overhead, and high traceability demand, leading to the efficient remote process tracking issue. Existing approaches can address the issue by monitoring or simulating remote task execution. Nevertheless, they do not provide a cost-effective solution, especially when unexpected situation occurs. Thus, we proposed a new cloud-edge collaboration framework for process DT generation. It addresses the efficient remote process tracking issue with a real-virtual collaborative process tracking (RVCPT) approach. The approach contains three patterns of real-virtual collaboration for tracking the entire process of task execution with a coevolution pattern, identifying unexpected situations with a discrimination pattern, and generating a process DT with a real-virtual fusion pattern. This approach can minimize tracking overhead, and meanwhile maintains high traceability, which maximizes the overall cost-effectiveness. With prototype development, case study and experimental evaluation show the applicability and performance advantage of the new cloud-edge collaboration framework in remote supervision.