TY - CONF

T1 - Towards a Reference Architecture for Leveraging Model Repositories for Digital Twins

AU - Lehner, Daniel

AU - Wolny, Sabine

AU - Mazak-Huemer, Alexandra

AU - Wimmer, Manuel

N1 - doi: 10.1109/ETFA46521.2020.9212109

PY - 2020

Y1 - 2020

N2 - In the area of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) the degree of complexity of systems continuously increases mainly based on new key-enabling technologies supporting those systems. One way to deal with this increasing complexity is to create a digital representation of such a physical system, a so-called Digital Twin (DT), which virtually acts in parallel ideally across the entire life-cycle of such a CPS. For this purpose the DT uses simulated or real-time data to mimic operations, control, and modify the CPS’s behaviour at runtime. However, building such DTs from scratch is not trivial, mainly due to the integrationtask of heterogeneous systems residing in the operation as well as different technological spaces. In order to tackle this challenge, Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) can be used to logically model a CPS with its physical components. Usually, in MDE such “logical models” are created at design time whichkeep them detached from the deployed system during runtime. Instead of building bilateral solutions between each runtime environment and every engineering tool, a dedicated integration layer is needed which can deal with both worlds (design as well as runtime). Therefore, we present in this paper a reference architecture that allows on the one side to query data from model repositories to enrich the running system with design time knowledge, and on the other side, to be able to reasoning about system states at runtime in design-time models. For this purpose we present a model repository query and management engine as mediator and show its feasibility by a demonstrationcase.

AB - In the area of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) the degree of complexity of systems continuously increases mainly based on new key-enabling technologies supporting those systems. One way to deal with this increasing complexity is to create a digital representation of such a physical system, a so-called Digital Twin (DT), which virtually acts in parallel ideally across the entire life-cycle of such a CPS. For this purpose the DT uses simulated or real-time data to mimic operations, control, and modify the CPS’s behaviour at runtime. However, building such DTs from scratch is not trivial, mainly due to the integrationtask of heterogeneous systems residing in the operation as well as different technological spaces. In order to tackle this challenge, Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) can be used to logically model a CPS with its physical components. Usually, in MDE such “logical models” are created at design time whichkeep them detached from the deployed system during runtime. Instead of building bilateral solutions between each runtime environment and every engineering tool, a dedicated integration layer is needed which can deal with both worlds (design as well as runtime). Therefore, we present in this paper a reference architecture that allows on the one side to query data from model repositories to enrich the running system with design time knowledge, and on the other side, to be able to reasoning about system states at runtime in design-time models. For this purpose we present a model repository query and management engine as mediator and show its feasibility by a demonstrationcase.

KW - Reference Architecture

KW - Model-driven engineering

KW - Digital Twin Engineering

U2 - 10.1109/ETFA46521.2020.9212109

DO - 10.1109/ETFA46521.2020.9212109

M3 - Paper

SP - 1077

EP - 1080

T2 - 25th IEEE International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation (EFTA)

Y2 - 8 September 2020 through 11 September 2020

ER -