Ruleless Digital Twins: Toward Declarative Decision-Making Through Standardized Frameworks and Technologies

Abstract

Digital twins (DTs) can be thought of as digital counterparts of physical objects, or more generally, twinning targets (TTs). To enact changes on and optimize for properties of their TTs, DTs use an element of decision-making. Traditionally, many domains, such as home automation, utilize rule-based decision-making models to imperatively define DT actions based on desired TT conditions. With evolving user specifications, rule-based models have become increasingly complex to develop and maintain, particularly in scenarios involving optimizations under dynamically changing systems, such as those affected by weather or dynamic energy pricing. We present an alternative in the form of ruleless digital twins (RDTs) that automatically produce optimal decisions with respect to purely declarative user specifications, similarly to the well-established ruleless approach of model predictive control. They do so through a combination of a semantic knowledge base, logical inference, simulation models, and an autonomic computing architecture, each exclusively based on a widely-used standard or technology. We evaluate our proof of concept through an incubator case study and experiments against a rule-based bang-bang controller in the context of a virtual office room environment. Results show core that RDT functionality performs better than the control in terms of maintaining desired room temperatures and minimizing energy costs under dynamically changing spot pricing. Additionally, due to combinatorial decision tree construction, RDTs require considerable computational power for longer prediction horizons, although their applicability to specific problem domains (and use of shorter horizons) ultimately falls on their users.