In 2002, Grieves defined the concept of the digital twin as a virtual instance of physical assets capable of continuously mirroring them. Ever since then, driven by remarkable industrial attention, digital twins flourished and ripened in several sectors. The notable industrial adoption has been sided by a growing interest from the software engineering community in general and the software architecture community in particular as demonstrated by the growing number of published peer-reviewed publications and proposed software architectural solutions for digital twins. In this paper, we report on the planning, execution, and results of a systematic mapping study on architecting digital twins. The study captures crucial aspects of software architectures for digital twins as types of architectural solutions, quality attributes, and architectural patterns. It supports practitioners in creating digital twins tailored to their specific needs and researchers in identifying trends and open challenges. Starting from an initial set of potentially relevant 1630 peer-reviewed publications, we selected 140 primary studies. We analysed the set of primary studies using thorough data extraction, analysis, and synthesis process. To compensate for single method limitations and reduce possible threats to conclusion validity, we discussed the results of our study with experts in the software architecture community. Based on our results, the field of software architecture for digital twins is lively and an increasing number of architectural solutions are being proposed. Although there is a lack of widely accepted reference architectural solutions for digital twins, most of them are built using a combination of the layered and service-oriented patterns and address maintainability, performance efficiency, and compatibility quality attributes.INDEX TERMS Architectural patterns, digital twin, software architectures, quality attributes.
The term digital twin refers to a comprehensive digital representation of a physical system that serves as its real-time digital counterpart. Digital twin goes beyond traditional computer-aided applications and represents a two-way communication bridge between the physical and the digital worlds. In 2020, Gartner identified digital twin as one of the ten technology trends capable of a profound impact on modern society. While digital twin originates from the manufacturing domain, its recent underpinning technology maturation makes it suitable to all those domains where there is a need for studying virtual interactions with the physical environment. Despite its peak of research and adoption, there are still some grey areas related to certain aspects of digital twin such as enabling technologies and reported benefits. In this paper, we report on the planning, execution and results of a systematic mapping study, which aimed at providing a structured and detailed snapshot of the current application of digital twin, enabling technologies, reported benefits and application domains. Starting from an initial set of 675 publications, we identified 26 primary studies, which we have analysed through a rigorous data extraction, analysis and synthesis process. Based on the collected data, we drew relations between digital twin and the production domain.
In recent years, software product line development has been adopted by a growing number of companies. Within software product line development, one way of creating specific products is by using configuration files to control a given set of parameters of the product at run time. Often, configuration files are created manually and this may lead to a sub-optimal process with respect to development effort and error proneness. In this experience report, we describe our work in enabling the automatic generation of configuration files in the railway domain. We discuss a four-step approach whose generation mechanism uses concepts of generative programming. The approach is the outcome of a bottom-up effort leveraging the experiences and the results from our technology transfer activities with our industrial partner, Bombardier Transportation. We evaluate the applicability and the correctness of the proposed approach using the Aventra train family from Bombardier Transportation.Besides, we evaluate the ability of the proposed approach in mitigating the development effort and error proneness typical of traditional manual approaches. We performed expert interviews to assess the industrial relevance of the proposed approach and collect qualitative feedback on the perceived benefits and drawbacks. Eventually, for each of the four steps composing the proposed approach, we identify factors that might affect the adoption of the approach and use these factors for discussing the lessons we have learned.
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