Digital Twin Space: The Integration of Digital Twins and Data Spaces

Digital Twins (DTs) are the novel paradigm for the development of Cyber-Physical systems. The state of art presents several use cases in different domains, and one of the most complex examples is represented by the Urban Digital Twin (UDT), which aims to virtualize urban assets (e.g., buildings, mobility infrastructures, energy grids, waste management facilities, etc.) and build advanced analysis and prediction services upon a city’s digital representation. UDTs represent a formidable example of system of systems, as they are structured into a hierarchy of interconnected DT instances that process and share a huge amount of data subject to different access and usage policies. Regarding data management in complex distributed scenarios, Data Spaces are an emerging paradigm that aims at building a secure and privacy-preserving infrastructure to pool, access, share, process and use data. As a matter of fact, existing DTs solutions (not only in the urban domain) do not present a clear software architecture characterization and, moreover, they pay little attention to the data management aspects. To bridge this gap, in this paper we present the Digital Twin Space, an architectural proposal that aims to instantiate Data Spaces into DTs according to the guidelines set by relevant international projects. We use the UDT as a running example and we validate the model in the case of a smartPV panel, showing that the model matches the real cyber-physical system.