Postdoc: Handling Evolutions in Digital Twins With Live Modeling

Context

A digital twin refers to a virtual representation or digital counterpart of a cyber-physical, possibly socio-technique, system, object, or process [1, 4]. It is created by collecting and integrating real-time data from sensors, devices, and other sources associated with the physical entity. The purpose of a digital twin is to simulate, monitor, and analyze the behavior, performance, and characteristics of its real-world counterpart [2, 3]. Thus, a digital twin can take the form of a set of models to abstract some aspect of reality of the system for a given purpose. Models can both consider the design-time and run-time of the system. Digital twins are commonly used in various industries, including manufacturing, healthcare, transportation, and more. By mimicking the real-world entity in a digital space, one can interact with and manipulate the digital twin to understand and improve the associated system or object.

Challenges

As any system and artifacts, both the systems and the digital twins are subject to evolutions. Indeed, one of the existing challenges is to ensure that the digital twin remains a valid representation of the physical system it is twining [5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]. Thus, when the system evolves, one must co-evolve the digital twin, i.e., models, the existing data, execution traces, etc. The digital twin changes can also serve to enhance the systems, hence, to co-evolve them as far as possible.

Objectives

The goal of the thesis is to explore the overall challenge of evolution in digital twins. In particular, the thesis can address one or several objectifs from the following ones:

• Design and implement recommendation services for and from the digital twin and the system.
• Model continuum from design to runtime: co-evolving the digital twins between the system design and the system runtime; back and forth.
• Model tuning, optimization and exploration at runtime with a look into adapting software architecture for digital twins.
• Co-evolution and refactoring between the system and digital twin,
• Aligning and co-evolving between execution traces and data of the system and the models of the digital twins.

Environment

The work will be realized in the DiverSE research team, joint to the CNRS (IRISA) and Inria, with the European Funding from the project MATISSE under the Horizon Europe programme.

The DiverSE team is located in Rennes, Brittany, France. DiverSE’s research is in the area of software engineering. The team is actively involved in European, French and industrial projects and is composed of 9 faculty members, 20 PhD students, 4 post-docs and 3 engineers. The candidate will work more specifically with Benoit Combemale (Prof. at the University of Rennes, DiverSE team) and Djamel Khelladi (CR CNRS, DiverSE team).

References

[1] W. Kritzinger, M. Karner, G. Traar, J. Henjes, W. Sihn: Digital Twin in manufacturing: A categorical literature review and classification. IFAC-PapersOnLine, 51(11), 2018

[2] R. Eramo, F. Bordeleau, B. Combemale, M. van den Brand, M. Wimmer, A. Wortmann: Conceptualizing Digital Twins. In: IEEE Software, 2021.

[3] Barricelli, B. R., Casiraghi, E., & Fogli, D. (2019). A survey on digital twin: Definitions, characteristics, applications, and design implications. IEEE access, 7, 167653-167671.

[4] Mihai, Stefan, Mahnoor Yaqoob, Dang V. Hung, William Davis, Praveer Towakel, Mohsin Raza, Mehmet Karamanoglu et al. “Digital twins: A survey on enabling technologies, challenges, trends and future prospects.” IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials (2022).

[5] Lehner, Daniel, Antonio Garmendia, and Manuel Wimmer. “Towards flexible evolution of Digital Twins with fluent APIs.” In 2021 26th IEEE International Conference on Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation (ETFA), pp. 1-4. IEEE, 2021.

[6] Jordan, Sven. “Co-evolving Digital Architecture Twins.” In European Conference on Software Architecture (ECSA), vol. 2978. 2021.

[7] Bersani, M. M., Braghin, C., Cortellessa, V., Gargantini, A., Grassi, V., Presti, F. L., … & Scandurra, P. (2022, March). Towards trust-preserving continuous co-evolution of digital twins. In 2022 IEEE 19th International Conference on Software Architecture Companion (ICSA-C) (pp. 96-99). IEEE.

[8] Ulyana Tikhonova, Jouke Stoel, Tijs van der Storm, and Thomas Degueule. 2018. Constraint-based run-time state migration for live modeling. In Proceedings of the 11th ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Software Language Engineering (SLE 2018). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 108–120. https://doi.org/10.1145/3276604.3276611

[9] van Rozen, R., van der Storm, T. Toward live domain-specific languages. Softw Syst Model 18, 195–212 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-017-0608-7

[10] Inventing on Principle by Bret Victor, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGYGl_xxfXA

How to apply

Send your CV, a motivation letter, and possibly recommendations letters to Benoit Combemale and Djamel E. Khelladi.