Digital Twins as Evolving Model-Centric Systems

Abstract.
Digital twins are emerging as an engineering paradigm to build software centred around models of physical objects or processes, with very diverse application domains. The purpose of a digital twin is to understand, predict and act on the behaviour of these physical systems. In engineering, the use of digital twins profoundly changes the management of the entire product lifecycle, from design to manufacturing and operations, because the digital twins adapt in response to the evolution of their physical counterpart. In this talk, we discuss digital twins from the perspective of behavioural models. We share some ideas about model evolution in digital twins from this perspective, tell you about our current research activities on digital twins at the University of Oslo, and discuss some ensuing research challenges at the intersection of formal methods and software engineering.

Bio.
Einar Broch Johnsen is a professor and the head of the Formal Methods group at the Department of Informatics, University of Oslo. His research interests include programming models and methodology; system specification and modeling; and the theory and application of formal methods. He is active in formal methods for distributed and concurrent systems, including object-oriented and concurrent languages, manycore computing, cloud computing, and digital twins. He is one of the main developers of the ABS modeling language. Homepage: https://ebjohnsen.org