Towards Digital Twins Cloud Platform: Microservices and Computational Workflows to Rule a Smart Factory

Abstract

The concept of "Industry 4.0" considers smart factories as data-driven and knowledge enabled enterprise intelligence. In such kind of factory, manufacturing processes and final products are accompanied by virtual models -- Digital Twins. To support Digital Twins concept, a simulation model for each process or system should be implemented as independent computational service. The only way to implement an orchestration of a set of independent services and provide scalability for simulation is to use a cloud computing platform as a provider of the computing infrastructure. In this paper, we describe a Digital Twin-as-a-Service (DTaaS) model for simulation and prediction of industrial processes using Digital Twins.