Towards a Product Line Architecture for Digital Twins

Digital twins are a new kind of software systems for which corresponding architectures in different engineering domains have emerged for enabling the efficient interaction of software systems with physical systems to realize cyber-physical systems (CPS). To facilitate the development of digital twins, various software platforms emerged in recent years, which often come with a certain architecture for the developed systems together with a set of domain-specific languages (DSLs) that help domain experts to configure the platform and implement the digital twins. This results in a set of architectures and DSLs which are currently used to realize the various concerns of digital twins. Thus, creating a comprehensive digital twin for a given system requires the combination of several architectures and DSLs, which is challenging as (i) the components of the different architectures have to be combined on a technological level, and (ii) the concerns specified with the different DSLs are developed in isolation which potentially leads to inconsistencies, especially during the evolution of digital twins.