Digital Twin Architecture – An Introduction

This chapter focuses on giving an overview about Digital Twin architectures. It emphasizes the description of a general architecture of a Digital Twin system based on different usage scenarios. These usage scenarios are following the evolution path of Digital Twins, staring from Digital Twin for production lifecycle management (PLM). From this starting point, Digital Twins are used with 3D visualization (AR/VR) and product usage simulations. Then Internet-of-Things (IoT) technology enabled capturing the dynamic state of the real asset. In todays closly connected world, cloud-based Digital Twins are utilizing broadband networks to enhance the real asset with cloud-based functionalities. The emergence of data spaces (such as define in GAIA-X or IDSA) enables secure and trusted data sharing. This will be the basis for distributed Digital Twin Worlds that simulate large parts of the world and solve important problems like the decarbonisation of the global society. Each step in this journey has an abstract architecture and a concrete example how the architecture is used.