Digital twins (DTs) lie at the heart of a new vision to support manufacturing and cyber-physical systems. The realization of their full potential requires complex technical solutions, due to unprecedented synchronization requirements, the need to support scenario playing and solution space exploration, and their nature as hubs that tie together numerous heterogeneous technological spaces. Hence, a key factor in making the notion of DTs succeed in large scale scenarios is to manage overall system complexity. It is therefore critical that DT standards support DTs and their integration with other systems by introducing as little accidental complexity as possible. Unfortunately, the DT standards developed to date are based on architectures that have been shown to be detrimental to this goal. I first briefly elaborate on why current DT standards do not sufficiently address the faced challenges and subsequently present two modelling paradigms that synergistically reduce and manage complexity. I will specifically focus on multi-level modelling as an approach to avoid accidental complexity when modelling domains.

Bio: Thomas has been an Associate Professor at Victoria University of Wellington since November 2007. Before that he was an Assistant Professor at the Technische Universität Darmstadt (Germany) and an Acting Professor at the Software Engineering Department of the University of Mannheim (Germany). Thomas received a ten year most influential regular paper award from the Springer journal Software and Systems Modeling. He furthermore received two ACM SIGSOFT distinguished paper awards.

This talk is part of the New Zealand Software Innovation Seminar (SI^NZ) Series: https://softwareinnovation.nz/seminars/

Zoom Link: https://vuw.zoom.us/my/softwareinnovationnewzealand