Real-time event-based platform for the development of digital twin applications

Digital twin has become essential to modern industrial developments and production paradigms. Digital twin provides support to users and processes in decision-making creating high-fidelity virtual models from physical objects in order to simulate their behaviors, predict their states, provide feedbacks, and if possible be optimized by themselves. The literature indicates an urgent need to develop digital twin applications. These applications require a digital platform that complies with DT requirements and allows all physical objects, virtual models, and industrial systems to communicate and integrate with each other. The contribution of this paper is to provide an analysis about digital twin (meaning and modeling), and to present a platform that works as: (1) a modern distributed system that runs as a cluster and can elastically scale to handle and integrate all the business applications, systems, and production data even the most massive data volumes; (2) a storage system that keeps data as long as necessary and provides real guarantees in delivery, persistence, performance (real time), reliability, and processing; (3) a real-time event-based platform that supports the requirements of digital twin applications including the management and support of different digital twin versions.