A Service-Oriented Digital Twin Framework for Dynamic and Robust Distributed Systems

Digital Twins (DTs) are virtual representations of physical products in many dimensions, such as geometry and behaviour. As a backbone of Industry 4.0, DTs help interpret and even predict the behaviour of physical processes, provide a virtual testbed for maintenance and upgrade, and enable automatic decision-making supported by artificial intelligence. Despite the promising future, challenges exist, such as the absence of a framework that facilitates the development and application of DTs in industrial contexts. We propose a service-oriented architecture (SOA) DT framework for dynamic and robust distributed systems. The framework contains two types of services. One includes the services provided to the users and is supported by an orchestration mechanism to ensure a quality of service (QoS). The other one refers to the common functions of all DTs. Further, we describe the DT-based decision-making enabled by our QoS-oriented learning of the framework and a Hoare-logic-based verification of QoS.