A Multi-faceted Interoperability Model for Reliable and Trustworthy Urban Digital Twins

The urban environment is a complex ecosystem that undergoes constant change, and Digital Twin (DT) technology can help to reliably track and map the dynamics through the use of real-time data, constantly evolving its representation along with the physical counterpart. To this end, Urban Digital Twins (UDTs) must be capable of ingesting a wide range of heterogeneous data, sourced by different (un)trusted actors, embodying different semantic and syntactic representations. This translates into having dedicated and tailored data processing pipelines, making up for a complex and difficult-to-maintain back-end logic. In addition, issues of interoperability, reliability, and trust arise when data need to be accessed and shared between digital twins operated by different providers. In this work, we advocate for a multifaceted interoperability model using Minimum Interoperability Models (MIMs) as an abstraction for standardized and secure data access and serverless technology as a processing layer interfacing with the various components and systems. Using a serverless architecture and cloud-based services, the proposal aims to offer scalability, flexibility, and cost effectiveness, enabling UDT developers to quickly build and deploy applications that can take advantage of the vast amounts of data generated in these environments. To validate our approach, we conduct a preliminary evaluation of our proposal through a series of experiments conducted in a real deployment environment.