SysML Model-Driven Development for Digital Twins

A Digital Twin is a virtual replica of a physical system that is used to simulate its behavior, and provide services to improve its operation. However, their rigorous development is a difficult task and requires considerable efforts especially for their design. In this paper, we introduce a SysML model-driven development methodology for digital twins, a way to design digital twins at a high level of abstraction, automatically generate an essential part of their implementation, and verify their fidelity to their physical counterpart. In this methodology, the architecture followed is independent from application domains, implementation technologies, and purposes of using DTs. The physical system behavior is integrated to a SysML model in an operational language, and the fidelity verification is performed using a data lake. We explain with a case study from the literature how to implement a prototype of the architecture in the open source tool Eclipse. The case study indicates that a SysML model can facilitate the design of digital twins, improving thus their development process.