Towards a Decision Framework to Select Cloud Services for Digital Twins

Digital twins (DTs) have widely been applied to manage complex systems. The emergence of cloud computing has made the cloud an enticing platform for hosting digital twins and has led to DT implementations adopting cloud-based technologies. Although the use of cloud services brings several opportunities, selecting a set of cloud services that fully satisfy all the requirements is still a difficult task. This paper examines the implementation decisions that need to be made after the design phase and how these decisions manifest in the cloud space by identifying mappings between DT functional components and cloud services. In this way, the paper contributes towards a framework that can guide the progression from a functional architecture to implementation. The framework draws from the cloud service selection (CSS) domain. A simple illustrative example is provided to contextualise the use of the framework.