Hypermedia-based digital twin ecosystems: A proposal for digital twin interoperability

Digital Twins have been primarily developed and used to virtualize individual physical assets, resulting in vertical application stacks. Going beyond this perspective, recent proposals envision ecosystems of connected Digital Twins that virtualize complex scenarios composed of a multitude of heterogeneous but interrelated physical assets, possibly belonging to different domains. This vision puts forth several engineering challenges, with the most significant being the ability to integrate Digital Twins developed using heterogeneous technologies. To this end, in this paper, we propose and discuss an approach based on Web technologies and standards for creating interoperable Digital Twin Ecosystems that allow consumers to browse Digital Twins seamlessly while being agnostic to the underlying heterogeneous implementations. We showcase our proposal on a case study in the healthcare domain, using a Digital Twin ecosystem to monitor the process of trauma management.