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System Overview

The Digital Twin as a Service (DTaaS) platform supports the whole digital twin (DT) lifecycle. Users create, configure, execute and share digital twins built from reusable assets[1]. The architecture follows established principles for realising digital twins in practice[2] and also supports use cases such as runtime verification of autonomous systems[3].

User Requirements

The platform provides the following capabilities:

  1. Author: create the assets of a DT on the platform itself. This requires software frameworks and tools built for authoring DT assets.
  2. Consolidate: consolidate the available DT assets and authoring tools so that users can navigate the library of reusable assets. This requires support for discovering available assets.
  3. Configure: select and configure DTs. This also requires validation of a given configuration.
  4. Execute: provision computing infrastructure on demand to execute a DT.
  5. Explore: interact with a DT and explore the results stored inside and outside the platform. Exploration may lead to analytical insights.
  6. Save: save the state of a DT that is already executing. This is needed to save and re-spawn DTs on demand.
  7. Services: integrate DTs with on-platform or external services that users can interact with.
  8. Share: share a DT with other users of their organisation.

System Architecture

The figure shows the system architecture of the DTaaS software platform.

System architecture System architecture

System Components

Users interact with the software platform through a web application. The service router is the single point of entry for direct access to platform services and controls user access to the microservice components. The service mesh provides microservice discovery, load balancing and authorization.

Further microservices manage DT reusable assets, platform services, the DT lifecycle, DT execution, accounting and security. The microservices are complementary and composable, and together they meet the core requirements of the system.

The microservices responsible for the user requirements are:

  1. The security microservice implements role-based access control (RBAC) in the platform.
  2. The accounting microservice keeps track of the live status of the platform, DT assets and infrastructure usage. It must enforce any licensing and usage restrictions. Accounting is a prerequisite for commercialising the platform. Because the platform makes heavy use of external infrastructure and resources, the accounting microservice needs to interface with the accounting systems of those external services.
  3. User Workspaces are virtual environments in which users perform lifecycle operations on DTs. These environments are either Docker containers or virtual machines that give users a desktop interface.
  4. Reusable Assets are the parts from which DTs are created. The assets page explains them further.
  5. Services are available to all DTs and users of the DTaaS platform. Services build on DTs and provide user interfaces to users.
  6. DT Execution Manager provides virtual and isolated execution environments for DTs. It also provisions cloud resources dynamically.
  7. DT Lifecycle Manager manages the lifecycle operations on all DTs. It directs the DT Execution Manager to execute, save and terminate DTs.

The web application can also carry domain-specific pages that come from separate npm packages. Client Extensions describes the current state and the proposed extension architecture.

Several of these components are not implemented yet; the table below gives their status. The architecture review describes the system as implemented.

The C4 diagram below shows the DTaaS architecture in more detail.

C4 architectural diagram

The table maps the architectural components to related pages in the documentation.

System Component Doc Page(s)
Service Router Traefik Gateway
Web Application React Web Application
Reusable Assets Library Microservice
Workflow Logs Logger Microservice
Digital Twins and DevOps Integrated GitLab
Platform Services Third-party Services (MQTT, InfluxDB, RabbitMQ, Grafana, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, and ThingsBoard)
DT Lifecycle Manager Not available yet
Security GitLab client OAuth 2.0 and server OAuth 2.0
Digital Twins as Services DT Runner
Accounting Not available yet
Execution Manager Not available yet

References

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[1]: Talasila, Prasad, et al. "Composable digital twins on Digital Twin as a Service platform." Simulation 101.3 (2025): 287-311.

[2]: Talasila, Prasad, et al. "Realising digital twins." The engineering of digital twins. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2024. 225-256.

[3]: Kristensen, Morten Haahr, et al. "Runtime Verification of Autonomous Systems Utilizing Digital Twins as a Service." 2024 IEEE International Conference on Autonomic Computing and Self-Organizing Systems Companion (ACSOS-C). IEEE, 2024.