Supporting Digital Twins Systems Integrating the MERODE Approach

Digital Twins (DTs) have emerged as a promising concept, representing a new paradigm in smart systems engineering. However, the development of DTs pose significant challenges, particularly on the modeling and data management aspects. This paper presents a holistic approach to develop a DT implementation using a domain model derived from the standard SSN/SOSA ontologies. The proposed approach leverages the MERODE modeling method for rapid prototyping and validation, guaranteeing robust model quality checks and enabling the creation of flexible and reusable code adaptable to different architectural settings. Data management is enhanced through the use of the SOSA/SSN ontology, enabling semantic data models and inference strategies to achieve semantic interoperability. By combining MERODE and IoT ontologies, our approach aims to take a step forward in addressing the challenges linked to system complexity and data management in the development of DT. The proposed approach was validated by instantiating the proposed model with a real-life case.