A Web-based approach for ecosystems of heterogeneous Digital Twins

The Digital Twin paradigm is growing in popularity in both academia and industry as an approach that can virtualize entities existing in the real world. In particular, Digital Twins refer to the ability to clone and mirror a Physical Asset during its life cycle through a software counterpart that consumers can exploit. Over the years, its wide applicability in different application domains resulted in the loss of uniformity in modeling and development, leading to the creation of vertical and closed silos. In recent years, some proposals from academia have tried to conceptualize an open and interoperable vision for the creation of Digital Twins ecosystems that mirror entire portions of reality. In particular, the Web of Digital Twins (WoDT) vision aims at the creation of open, distributed, and dynamic ecosystems of connected Digital Twins creating a cross-domain and cross-organization service-oriented layer. This thesis proposes a Web-based design of the Web of Digital Twins vision that, exploiting a uniform interface that leverages Web technologies, aspires to the creation of ecosystems of heterogeneous Digital Twins, implemented with possibly different technologies. Moreover, part of the objective is the creation of a compatibility layer towards other popular paradigms, such as the Web of Things. The Web-based Web of Digital Twins supports the composition of discoverable and navigable ecosystems of cross-domain and cross-organizational Digital Twins that can serve as an open and interoperable service layer for applications on top. The idea resulted in the drafting of two specifications, for the obtainment of WoDT-compliant ecosystems, and in the creation of an abstract architecture that supports their implementation. The feasibility of the design has been proved through a prototypical implementation and subsequently exemplified through a use-case scenario.