Engineering Digital Process Twins: Towards a Methodology Based on MDE and DevOps

Abstract

A Digital Process Twin (DPT) is a digital twin (DT) of a business process designed to monitor, adapt, and optimize organizational workflows to maintain the efficiency, adaptability, and competitiveness of businesses. The benefits of DPTs are many: outcome prediction, data-driven insights for optimization, and streamlined tracking of inefficiencies. However, developing DTs of business processes introduces new challenges, such as a lack of tool support for DPTs, interoperability challenges between DPTs, and integration of process assets such as user input and external databases. To address these challenges, this paper presents an initial framework for DPTs deployment, illustrated through a library management system use case. Our approach leverages MERODE, a Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) approach for developing enterprise information systems, and GitOps, an application of DevOps principles to Git-based version control, to automate the static description of business assets.