Challenges in Modelling Applications for Safe and Resilient Digital Twins

Digital twin-based modern smart city infrastructures are evolving into intelligent and distributed systems of autonomous entities operating in a dynamic cyber-physical environment to offer real-time and critical services. These services are typically implemented as software applications in various application domains, e.g., healthcare, cooperative robotic systems, and autonomous vehicles. However, to assure continued safe operations of the critical services with strict real-time requirements even when the service is under attack is an extremely challenging task mainly because the underlying operating environment for such applications is highly volatile yet distributed. To this end, first, we classify (as we call it) timed resilience requirements into computational and communication resilience and then discuss key challenges that hinder the modeling of such requirements to help develop rigorous distributed applications for real-time resilient autonomous systems. Finally, we demonstrate our vision to handle these challenges by introducing by-design and by-response approaches that consider security as a prerequisite of the safety and resilience of autonomous systems.