Enabling secure and trusted digital twin federations with data spaces

As digital twin ecosystems (DTEs) expand across various sectors, enabling secure and trusted collaboration among diverse instances remains a critical challenge. Current approaches often lack standardized mechanisms for data sharing, governance, and trust, hindering large-scale interoperability. This paper presents an approach for the secure federation of DTs using data spaces (DSs), grounded in NGSI-LD standards and policy-based governance models, including ODRL-based access control. This federation approach facilitates trusted data exchange among heterogeneous digital twin (DT) instances through a layered trust and governance approach, supporting decentralization and scalability. Moreover, the proposed approach addresses key barriers to DT federation and offers pathways to integrate participants from trusted federated context in complex DT environments securely, leveraging advantages of DS technology. A case study documents an implementation of this federation approach, demonstrating how DSs enable secure context data sharing across different DT environments.