On-demand Shared Digital Twins – An Information Architectural Model to Create Transparency in Collaborative Supply Networks

Abstract

Industrial companies already apply digital twins for the digital representation of the physical world. In addition, information sharing becomes increasingly decisive for the competition, e.g. in supply networks where products and logistics data such as demands and capacities are exchanged. As many companies are, however, highly reluctant to share data across the supply chain, this paper applies the methodology of design science research to, first, state the requirements for shared digital twins based on five industrial use cases. It turns out that with regard to data decentralism, sovereignty and compatibility through global standardization are key success factors. Hence, second, this paper presents a concept for a shared digital twin providing data on demand, i.e. at the right time and in particular with data condensed to the concrete need.

Designing Essential Components For Logistics Data Spaces: Connecting Logistics interfaces, Converters, Knowledge, and Standards

“…Främling et al (2013) discussed that GS1 EPCIS can be too complex or costly to implement compared to the promised benefits. This is confirmed by other studies that implementing standards can impose a big investment burden for SMEs due to the required technical solutions for bridging the information model adopted by each of these companies with the global standard agreed by the network (Cirullies & Schwede, 2021;Ferreira et al, 2012;Kazantsev et al, 2022;Scholz et al, 2018). Furthermore, Andreeva et al (2016) and Debicki and Kolinski (2019) also argued that even though there exists a common transmission protocol and API message format like JSON, the effort to reconcile and foster semantic interoperability between these standards can be cumbersome.…”

“…The first one is the Connector Store, which provides a repository of mappings for network participants to facilitate data exchange between heterogenous ICT environments. The second one is the Interoperability Simulator, which simulates collaboration opportunities between participants prior to implementation and might combine the Digital Twin and the IDS principles for simulating the interoperability within the network as demonstrated by Cirullies and Schwede (2021). This thesis aims to realize the former to support the connection between stakeholders in the Dutch logistics sector according to the IDS principles and realize an interoperable and sovereign data space for the participants.…”

“…Next to that, it should stimulate innovation and inclusion of SMEs through the connect-once-reach-all scheme. And more importantly, such an ecosystem for data-sharing should promote trust for members, facilitate data provenance, and control data access with agreed rules for data (re)use Cirullies and Schwede (2021). connect to the IDS vision by prescribing data exchange between the data owner and user through a single-entry point called…”

Data Catalogs in the Enterprise: Applications and Integration

“…In the inter-organizational sphere, Data Space Data Catalogs enable the metadata-based inventory and discovery of data products to be shared between organizations in data spaces. Next to the functional semantic description of available data sources they allow for the definition and assessment of accessibility information and usage conditions for other organizations [6]. They do not hold the data itself as organizations want to preserve their data sovereignty and K therefore neglect the transfer of data to central platforms before the actual exchange.…”

A Reinforcement Learning Powered Digital Twin to Support Supply Chain Decisions

“…They split their framework into four major components: data collection, data integration, multi-agent decision making and dynamic network analysis. Lastly, [21] define an on-demand shared digital twin for supply chain management. They raise several key problems: (i) data sovereignty issues may happen along the chains, especially global ones and (ii) data formats should be as interoperable as possible, maybe even language and model agnostic.…”