Synchronization in Digital Twins for Industrial Control Systems

Digital twins, which are a new concept in industrial control systems (ICS), play a key role in realizing the vision of a smart factory, and they can have different effective use cases. With digital twins, we have virtual replicas of physical systems so that they precisely mirror the internal behavior of the physical systems. Hence, synchronization is necessary to keep the states of digital twins in sync with those of their physical counterparts. Otherwise, their behavior may be different from each other, and it can lead to wrong decisions about the system that can have catastrophic consequences. In this paper, we propose three different architectures for digital twins, and then by investigating their ability to follow the physical system’s behavior, we will determine the best architecture, whose output has the lowest error compared with the physical system’s output.