Towards Requirements Engineering for Digital Twins of Cyber-Physical Systems

Abstract

Digital twins (DTs) are promising to revolutionize the way future Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) – which are becoming increasingly complex every day– will be developed and operated. To deal with such increasing complexity and to enable CPSs to handle uncertain and unknown situations, DTs provide a viable solution, although they are themselves complicated to build. Thus, a fundamental question is how to engineer DTs for CPSs that are secure and trustworthy. When developing a DT, the first step is the engineering of its requirements to ensure that we are building a correct DT. In this paper, we present our ideas and a research agenda on how requirements engineering of various types of DTs for CPSs should be performed. We present research challenges that need to be addressed, open research questions, and discuss possible solutions.