Cyber-physical and business perspectives using Federated Digital Twins in multinational and multimodal transportation systems

Abstract: Digital Twin (DT) technologies promise to remove cyber-physical barriers in systems and services and provide seamless management of distributed resources effectively. Ideally, full-fledged instantiations of DT offer bi-directional features for physical-virtual representations, tackling data governance, risk assessment, security and privacy protections, resilience, and performance, to name a few characteristics. More broadly, Federated Digital Twins (FDT) are distributed physical-virtual counterparts that collaborate for enacting synchronisation and accurate mapping of multiple DT instances. In this work we focus on understanding and conceptualising the cyber-physical and business perspectives using FDT in multinational and multimodal transportation systems. These settings enforce a plethora of regulations, compliance, standards in the physical counterpart that must be carefully considered in the virtual mirroring. Our aim is to discuss the regulatory and technical underpinnings and, consequently, the existing operational and budgetary overheads to factor in when designing or operating FDT.