A Four-Layer Architecture Pattern for Constructing and Managing Digital Twins

The promise of a digital twin is to make asset lifecycle information accessible by providing a single access point to the information. Thereby, it reduces the required time and effort and enables new data-intensive use cases. This paper provides an abstract four-layer architecture pattern to construct digital twins and to incorporate information from various kinds of sources. The pattern is designed to be flexibly extensible with new information sources and can flexibly support new kinds of proprietary or standard information. We discuss various alternatives to implement the pattern and provide an example realization based on microservices and OPC UA.