A Cloud-Edge Orchestration Platform for the Innovative Industrial Scenarios of the IoTwins Project

The concept of digital twins has growing more and more interest not only in the academic field but also among industrial environments thanks to the fact that the Internet of Things has enabled its cost-effective implementation. Digital twins (or digital models) refer to a virtual representation of a physical product or process that integrate data from various sources such as data APIs, historical data, embedded sensors and open data, giving to the manufacturers an unprecedented view into how their products are performing. The EU-funded IoTwins project plans to build testbeds for digital twins in order to run real-time computation as close to the data origin as possible (e.g., IoT Gateway or Edge nodes), and whilst batch-wise tasks such as Big Data analytics and Machine Learning model training are advised to run on the Cloud, where computing resources are abundant. In this paper, the basic concepts of the IoTwins project, its reference architecture, functionalities and components have been presented and discussed.