Towards architecting digital twin-pervaded systems

Digital twins are virtual models for representing, monitoring, and controlling real-world products, entities, and processes, and are fundamental for enabling digitalization and continuous engineering processes. The usage of digital twins for engineering software-intensive systems will significantly change current business models, development approaches, and technologies. In this regard, the application scenarios and starting conditions for companies to introduce digital twins are manifold depending on their experience in software and system engineering, the maturity of their development processes, and the strategic management support and motivation. This article describes (i) challenges and impacts on the system development activities and architecture design approaches that are caused by the introduction and exploitation of digital twins, and also (ii) proposals for tailoring and extending traditional architecture-centric engineering processes to consider digital twin concepts.