Requirements and Design Architecture for Digital Twin End-to-End Trustworthiness

Abstract

The wide adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT) involves a previously unseen level of complexity imposing to multiple stakeholders to deal with and trust the complex integration of applications with a plethora of heterogeneous devices. In this context, digital twins (DTs) have emerged as a suitable paradigm for bridging the digital and physical domains by masking the complexity of the latter with established software interfaces made available to applications by the former. In this work, we discuss how DTs can be designed, deployed, and managed to enable end-to-end trustworthiness between applications and the physical domain. Particularly, 1) we identify the key characteristics enabling end-to-end DT trustworthiness, 2) we evaluate the degree to which available DT platforms support these characteristics, 3) we highlight a blueprint architecture paving the way to innovative DT platforms natively supporting end-to-end trustworthiness, and 4) we show the benefits of our proposal with an industrial IoT use case.