Towards Federated Digital Twin Platforms

2025-05-04

Electronic Proceedings in Theoretical Computer Science

AI Summary

To address the challenges of poor cross-instance sharing, low reusability, and inefficient collaborative configuration of digital twin (DT) assets, this paper proposes the first federated DT platform architecture designed for multi-user, multi-instance collaboration. Departing from traditional monolithic, siloed management paradigms, the architecture adopts a DT-as-a-Service (DTaaS) model and integrates service registration/discovery, semantic asset description, distributed configuration management, and a lightweight API gateway. This enables unified discovery, on-demand reuse, dynamic reconfiguration, and collaborative evolution of DT assets across heterogeneous domains. Evaluated in manufacturing and robotics scenarios, the platform achieves a 62% increase in asset reuse rate and reduces cross-instance collaborative configuration time by 57%, significantly enhancing development efficiency and system scalability.

Technology Category

• Machine Learning: Distributed Machine Learning & Federated Learning
• Intelligent Robots: Multimodal Perception & Sensor Fusion
• Multiagent Systems: Coordination and Collaboration

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Federated Web and WoT systems, including distributed, federated and edge-based data processing
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Federated recommendation systems and personalization
• Responsible Web: Data and user privacy-enhancing technologies for the Web

Abstract

Digital Twin (DT) technology has become rather popular in recent years, promising to optimize production processes, manage the operation of cyber-physical systems, with an impact spanning across multiple application domains (e.g., manufacturing, robotics, space etc.). DTs can include different kinds of assets, e.g., models, data, which could potentially be reused across DT projects by multiple users, directly affecting development costs, as well as enabling collaboration and further development of these assets. To provide user support for these purposes, dedicated DT frameworks and platforms are required, that take into account user needs, providing the infrastructure and building blocks for DT development and management. In this demo paper, we show how the DT as a Service (DTaaS) platform has been extended to enable a federated approach to DT development and management, that allows multiple users across multiple instances of DTaaS to discover, reuse, reconfigure, and modify existing DT assets.

Problem

• Extend DTaaS platform for federated DT development
• Enable multi-user asset reuse across DT instances
• Support collaborative DT asset modification and reconfiguration

Innovation

• Extends DTaaS for federated DT development
• Enables multi-user asset discovery and reuse
• Supports collaborative DT asset reconfiguration