Lifecycle Governance for Effective Digital Twins: a Joint Systems Engineering and IT Perspective
conference paper
Digital twins run concurrently with the assets and systems they mirror. They offer real-time execution of advanced control schemes, e.g., for smart buildings, but also various analysis tasks, e.g., for predictive maintenance that ensures resilience. In this, they need to cope with change: The physical twins they mirror operate in a highly dynamic environment with unknown or unexpected variables and impact factors to which they adapt or are adapted to via upgrades, maintenance, or behavioral changes. Keeping digital twins fit for their purpose over their lifecycle is thus a demanding governance challenge that needs to be addressed in tandem with the lifecycle management of the mirrored system. We argue that the best practices of Systems Engineering (SE) and Information Technology (IT), especially software development, need to be brought together to succeed. In this paper, we present a joint SE and IT lifecycle model called the Double Helix model. It highlights the concurrent governance processes of both twins, capturing the temporal dynamics of the environment and the system itself. It accents the important concept of the leading twin. The Double Helix model captures both design and operational phases of SE and management, going from cradle to grave, by empowering a shift from using data in offline simulations during design, to the online operational phase.
Topics
TNO Identifier
874877
Collation
8 p.
Files
To receive the publication files, please send an e-mail request to TNO Repository.