Harmonizing Physical and Digital Twins Lifecycles

The Digital Twin (DT) lifecycle plays a pivotal role in accurately and reliably representing its associated Physical Twin (PT). Modeling such representation may be complicated since PTs can adapt telemetry frequency and have different value ranges over time in different phases of their lifecycle with respect to their operational context. If not appropriately accounted for, these variations introduce complexity in maintaining synchronization with the DT: the changes may be misinterpreted as failures while only reflecting expected alterations in the PT's behavior in a given phase. The proposed approach provides a foundation for explicitly modeling and harmonizing the phases of PTs and DTs lifecycles, improving decision-making and operational awareness in cyber-physical systems. We present an experimental evaluation within a reference industrial use case, demonstrating the practical benefits of explicitly mirroring the PT lifecycle in the DT.