Digital Twin Bus: Increasing Cross-Platform Interoperability of Digital Twin Platforms

Emerging Digital Twin (DT) platforms, offered by vendors such as Microsoft Azure or Amazon AWS, play a key role in facilitating the development and administration of DTs. However, each of these platforms currently still uses its own dedicated data formats and communication protocols, which hinders cross-platform interoperability. This missing interoperability implies high manual effort for interacting with DTs hosted on different platforms. Thus, the goal of this thesis is to evaluate how the interoperability of different DT platforms from various software vendors can be increased. In order to reduce this effort and increase the interoperability between various DT platforms, we propose the Digital Twin Bus (DTB). The DTB aims to support the handling of DTs and additional external services that run on various platforms by providing a central communication and management interface. To assess the efficacy of the proposed DTB solution, a case study is conducted, comparing its performance against a baseline approach. The results of the case study show that the proposed DTB solution is an appropriate solution for increasing the interoperability of DT platforms. Key benefits include the management of DTs hosted on different DT platforms, the availability of reusable code that requires no additional implementation effort, and the ability to connect multiple external services efficiently.