Towards Model-Driven Digital Twin Engineering: Current Opportunities and Future Challenges

Digital Twins have emerged since the beginning of this millennium to better support the management of systems based on (real-time) data collected in different parts of the operating systems. Digital Twins have been successfully used in many application domains, and thus, are considered as an important aspect of Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE). However, their development, maintenance, and evolution still face major challenges, in particular: (i) the management of heterogeneous models from different disciplines, (ii) the bi-directional synchronization of digital twins and the actual systems, and (iii) the support for collaborative development throughout the complete life-cycle. In the last decades, the Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) community has investigated these challenges in the context of software systems. Now the question arises, which results may be applicable for digital twin engineering as well. In this paper, we identify various MDE techniques and technologies which may contribute to tackle the three mentioned digital twin challenges as well as outline a set of open MDE research challenges that need to be addressed in order to move towards a digital twin engineering discipline.