Atefeh Gooran Orimi, Rayen Hamlaoui, Christian Backe, Veit Briken, Roland Lachmayer

Digital Twins (DTs) have received significant interest in recent years, particularly in industrial and engineering projects. Nonetheless, despite their considerable benefits, existing DTs are primarily domain-dependent and cannot be well generalized. This drawback hinders a straightforward implementation of DTs by researchers and is specifically evident when the physical twin corresponds to field-related entities within distributed systems. In this contribution, we propose a DT model for distributed systems and importantly focus on the communication between and within both physical and virtual spaces. Subsequently, we define the necessary components and elaborate on their specific characteristics and functionalities in the context of digital master and digital shadows. For our investigations here, we further explore a case study implemented in the archetype GOLO of the NFDI4Ing consortia. We provide a comprehensive description of the investigated distributed system and discuss how the proposed DT model can be efficiently applied.