An Entanglement-Aware Middleware for Digital Twins

Abstract

The development of the Digital Twin (DT) approach is tilting research from initial approaches that aim at promoting early adoption to sophisticated attempts to develop, deploy, and maintain applications based on DTs. In this context, we propose a highly dynamic and distributed ecosystem where containerized DTs co-evolve with an orchestration middleware. DTs provide digitalized representations of the targeted physical systems, while the orchestration middleware monitors and re-configures the deployed DTs in light of application constraints, available resources, and the quality of cyber-physical entanglement. First, we lay out the reference scenario. Then, we discuss the limitations of current approaches and identify a set of requirements that shape both DTs and the orchestration middleware. Subsequently, we describe a blueprint architecture that meets those requirements. Finally, we report empirical evidence on both the feasibility and the effectiveness of a proof-of-concept implementation of the proposed ecosystem.