From Context-Aware Collaborative IoT to Digital Twins: Architectural Foundations and Research Roadmap for Distributed Intelligent Systems and Systems of Systems

Abstract

The increasing deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructures in smart environments is enabling the continuous generation of heterogeneous data from devices, services and stakeholders, facilitating the interconnection between physical and digital entities. However, many current solutions still process such data in a fragmented manner, with limited support for cross-domain contextualization, real-time reasoning, and distributed intelligence. In parallel, Digital Twins (DTs) emerge as a promising paradigm for representing and managing complex smart systems, yet many existing approaches still lack a clear path from context-aware IoT data processing to operational, adaptive, and collaborative twins. This paper presents a research roadmap from Collaborative IoT and context awareness toward DTs and Systems of Systems (SoS) of DTs, grounded in our previous work on context-aware service architectures, homogeneous context representation, real-time event correlation, and distributed processing across the computing continuum. The roadmap is structured around three complementary directions: context-aware models for adaptive and intelligent DT behavior, composability, collaboration and hybrid intelligence in systems and SoS of DTs, and servitization and augmentation in DT ecosystems. The paper also identifies ongoing research efforts and the key challenges that must be addressed to enable the practical realization of this roadmap.