Multifaceted Autonomy as a Negotiable Asset of Digital Process Twins

Autonomy is a multifaceted property beyond technology. It significantly concerns people and organizations. Business case developers need to consider these aspects when specifying operational processes. They increasingly concern Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), which are composed of virtual and physical components. Although these applications attract attention due to their potential to innovate various fields, such as transportation, healthcare, and manufacturing, their intertwined computational and physical character requires capturing autonomy, heterogeneity, and adaptability of components or sub-systems even during runtime. Hence, organizational autonomy needs to be aligned for implementation with CPS capabilities. In order to deal with the resulting complexity in development, we suggest a Digital Process Twin (DPT) approach, integrating design and engineering. We suggest a choreographic approach to twin behavior modeling, as it facilitates role-specific, and thus human-centered design and engineering. It enables capturing not only functional requirements, but also capabilities for sharing autonomy. Once sharing features can be integrated into each component of a CPS, autonomy can become a negotiable asset. We demonstrate the autonomy-handling approach by designing a DPT that is represented by executable behavior models. They enable CPS components to share autonomy during runtime on the level of business operation. The proof-of-concept is demonstrated by an intelligent logistics use case tested in the field.