Modular Engineering of Industrial Digital Twins: The WLDT Approach

The increasing complexity of production systems, supply chains, and asset management in the industrial sector demands advanced digital solutions to enhance efficiency, reduce downtime, and support data-driven decision-making. Digital Twin (DT) technology has emerged as a key enabler, allowing real-time monitoring, optimization, and simulation of industrial processes. However, many existing Digital Twin implementations remain highly application-specific, lacking a modular framework for their design, development, and deployment. Such a framework is essential to enable effective interoperability across physical and digital layers, facilitate component reuse, and support the integration of augmentation functions. This paper introduces how DTs implemented with the White Label Digital Twins (WLDT) framework can leverage its general-purpose modular approach to enhance system simplicity and extensibility. DT instances can hence be deployed as individual software components and be easily integrated to build cyber-physical systems. We showcase and validate the proposed framework in a realistic microfactory environment, demonstrating its effectiveness in developing scalable and flexible DT ecosystems of industrial systems.