A Modeling Approach for Composed Digital Twins in Cooperative Systems

Digital Twin (DT) technology has gained a great deal of attention as an enabling technology, due to the benefits it can provide in relation to monitoring, optimization, efficiency, and decision-making of their physical counterparts. Developing DTs is however not an easy task, since it relies on several modeling methods and implementation aspects. Several DT platforms have emerged recently to cover the design and development of DTs, and most of them use an object-oriented paradigm.
In this paper, we propose a modeling approach for DTs in cooperative systems that provides composition and reusability. This approach extends from information modeling approaches for DTs to include the representation of behavioral models and semantic relationships through an ontology. By including the semantic layer in the modeling approach, inferences are also enabled based on semantic rules and queries.
The approach is translated into an object-oriented module and used in a case study composed of two cooperative robotic arms. The demonstration shows that this approach supports the modeling and functional aspects of DT systems and increases the reusability of developed DTs through composition.