Overcoming the Data Availability Paradox with Managed Digital Twin Instances

Digital transformation, IoT, and cloud storage have led to vast data collections that tend to exist in isolated silos, thus limiting their utilization. This leads to the data availability paradox, in which individuals, groups, and organizations possess vast amounts of data but struggle to utilize or share it effectively. The struggle is due to privacy, security, and intellectual property concerns. When this happens, individuals and institutions are unable to take full advantage of the capability of Industry 4.0 and digitalization. This paper proposes using managed Digital Twin Instances (DTI) to overcome this paradox. The fully managed digital twin instances provide well-defined and fully controlled access to models derived from the underlying data sets. Digital twin instances, therefore serve as virtual replicas of real-world systems, entities, or processes, enabling controlled access. A key issue in this approach is the effective hosting and managing large numbers of digital twin instances. The paper introduces a management and hosting framework and its evaluation in the MS Azure cloud environment.