Digital Twin Requirement Checking for Cyber-Physical Consistency
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Solution Overview
Problem
In the design and development of cyber-physical systems, maintaining the quality, coherence, and consistency of engineering solutions across different areas of responsibility is challenging due to frequent changes and the lack of continuous integration across all work areas, often leading to inconsistencies and increased costs.
Innovation Solution
The method involves creating digital twins for each cyber-physical system, linking them to communicate and adapt system requirements, ensuring that changes are identified and propagated accurately across the network, with each digital twin having an engineering part to manage and document requirements, and using a communication interface to inform relevant stakeholders.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If digital twins are created and linked to communicate system requirements across cyber-physical systems, then the reliability and consistency of system requirements checking is improved, but the device complexity and implementation cost increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent creates digital twins as virtual copies of cyber-physical systems to represent and check system requirements. Each digital twin contains a model of the corresponding physical system's requirements, allowing virtual verification without affecting the actual physical systems. This copying approach enables comprehensive requirements checking while maintaining system independence.
Solution Approach 2:
The digital twins serve as intermediary entities between different cyber-physical systems and their requirements. Instead of directly checking requirements between physical systems, the digital twins act as mediators that exchange and compare requirement information, simplifying the complexity of direct system-to-system verification.
2Measurement precision
If digital twins continuously communicate and adapt system requirements across the network, then the detection precision of inconsistencies is improved, but the energy consumption and computational resources increase
Solution Approach 1:
The digital twins perform preliminary requirement checking and adaptation in the virtual domain before implementation in physical systems. By detecting and resolving inconsistencies digitally beforehand, the system avoids costly physical trial-and-error, reducing overall energy consumption despite the computational overhead of digital twin operations.
Solution Approach 2:
The digital twins continuously exchange requirement information and provide feedback to each other, enabling automatic detection and adaptation of inconsistencies. This feedback mechanism allows the system to learn from previous interactions and improve requirement consistency over time without requiring exhaustive checking of every possible scenario.
3Adaptability or versatility
If system requirements are frequently updated and propagated across all digital twins, then the adaptability of the composite system is improved, but the loss of time for synchronization and coordination increases
Solution Approach 1:
The digital twin network implements dynamic requirement propagation where updates are selectively transmitted only when and where needed. Instead of forcing synchronous updates across all digital twins, the system allows asynchronous adaptation where each digital twin can independently process and integrate requirement changes at its own pace, reducing synchronization overhead.
Solution Approach 2:
The requirement propagation is segmented into targeted updates sent only to affected digital twins rather than blanket notifications to all systems. This segmentation approach identifies which digital twins need to be updated based on the nature of the requirement change, significantly reducing the time and communication overhead compared to universal synchronization.
Data Source
AI summary
Provided is a method for checking system requirements of cyber-physical systems in a composite system, including creating a digital twin for at least one cyber-physical in each case; stipulating system requirements for each of the cyber-physical systems; storing the system requirements of the cyber-physical systems directly and/or indirectly in those digital twins which are each assigned to the cyber-physical system; and linking at least two or more digital twins The linked digital twins each communicate in pairs with one another and at least partially interchange their system requirements with each other; the digital twins compare the stored system requirements with the received system requirements; the digital twins adapt their system requirements on the basis of the comparison carried out with the received system requirements and can stipulate these as a new system requirement; and the digital twins communicate their newly stipulated system requirements to the other digital twins.