Twin2Clouds: Cost-Aware Digital Twin Engineering and Deployment Across Federated Clouds

The paper presents Twin2Clouds, a novel framework that makes deploying digital twins across multiple cloud providers significantly more cost-efficient. By structuring digital twin architectures into five cloud-oriented layers and applying cloud-agnostic pricing models, the system identifies the most economical services for each layer. In real-world evaluations- from a smart home with 100 devices to a smart building with 30,000 devices – Twin2Clouds reduced monthly cloud costs by an average of 24.6%, and in some cases by up to 79%, compared to single-provider solutions. This innovation equips engineers with a vendor-neutral, reproducible, and scalable approach to digital twin deployment, paving the way for more sustainable and economically viable applications in smart infrastructure and beyond.