Cyber-Physical Interaction Engineering of Industrial Digital Twin Ecosystems

Industrial digital twin (DT) ecosystems consist of potentially heterogeneous DTs interacting with their respective counterparts in the physical space and with digital entities in the virtual space. Such interactions may vary dynamically and unpredictably, making their engineering a complex and largely unexplored research field. To address this gap, this work revisits the service interaction patterns originally identified in the context of collaborative business processes. This includes a discussion on whether, and to what extent, such patterns are suitable for industrial DT ecosystems. The focus is on the issues of entanglement and composition in cyber-physical interactions. Next, the paper proposes a set of requirements to engineer cyber-physical interactions and engineers a DT implementation compliant with such requirements. Finally, the implemented DT is experimentally evaluated in an industrial scenario.