Connecting Industrie 4.0 Digital Twins during Execution to Other Components’ Interfaces

Assets’ Digital Twins (DTs) are a key component to establish an adaptive, resource-efficient, value-creating and user-friendly Industrie 4.0 (I4.0). Efficient and resilient data streams from assets to DTs and further components like value-based services must be configurable with as little manual effort as possible – and ideally automatically during DT execution. This paper proposes an I4.0-compliant, interoperable submodel for the configuration of DT connectors to other components’ interfaces and protocols. Since I4.0 DT runtimes are able to process submodels by design, only little adjustment is necessary to enable the creation, update and removal of such DT connectors during DT execution. In particular, this feature enables automatic DT orchestration, adaptive asset integration and administration, and flexible DT persistence and recovery.