A Case Study on the Application of Digital Twins for Enhancing CPS Operations

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates how Digital Twins can improve cyber-physical systems by offloading computations and enhancing fault tolerance, thereby reducing costs and downtime in industrial applications.

Contribution

It provides a case study showing the practical application of Digital Twins for functional augmentation and fault tolerance in CPS across different domains.

Findings

Digital Twins effectively offload computations from CPS.

Enhanced fault tolerance reduces system downtime.

Cost savings achieved through Digital Twin integration.

Abstract

To ensure the availability and reduce the downtime of complex cyber-physical systems across different domains, e.g., agriculture and manufacturing, fault tolerance mechanisms are implemented which are complex in both their development and operation. In addition, cyber-physical systems are often confronted with limited hardware resources or are legacy systems, both often hindering the addition of new functionalities directly on the onboard hardware. Digital Twins can be adopted to offload expensive computations, as well as providing support through fault tolerance mechanisms, thus decreasing costs and operational downtime of cyber-physical systems. In this paper, we show the feasibility of a Digital Twin used for enhancing cyber-physical system operations, specifically through functional augmentation and increased fault tolerance, in an industry-oriented use case.