About Digital Twins, agents, and multiagent systems: a cross-fertilisation journey

TL;DR

This paper explores the relationship between Digital Twins and multiagent systems, aiming to enhance the understanding and application of Digital Twins as versatile engineering abstractions through cross-fertilization with agent-oriented approaches.

Contribution

It introduces a novel perspective linking Digital Twins with agents and multiagent systems, highlighting potential benefits for complex socio-technical system engineering.

Findings

Digital Twins can be enriched by agent-oriented engineering.

Multiagent systems offer a framework for general-purpose Digital Twins.

Cross-fertilisation can address current domain-specific limitations.

Abstract

Digital Twins (DTs) are rapidly emerging as a fundamental brick of engineering cyber-physical systems, but their notion is still mostly bound to specific business domains (e.g. manufacturing), goals (e.g. product design), or application domains (e.g. the Internet of Things). As such, their value as general purpose engineering abstractions is yet to be fully revealed. In this paper, we relate DTs with agents and multiagent systems, as the latter are arguably the most rich abstractions available for the engineering of complex socio-technical and cyber-physical systems, and the former could both fill in some gaps in agent-oriented engineering and benefit from an agent-oriented interpretation -- in a cross-fertilisation journey.