Modeling Digital Twin Data and Architecture: A Building Guide With FIWARE as Enabling Technology

The use of digitial twins (DTs) in industry has become a growing trend in recent years, allowing improvement of the life cycle of any process by taking advantage of the relationship between the physical and virtual worlds. Existing literature posits several challenges for building DTs, as well as some proposals for overcoming them. However, in the vast majority of the cases, the architectures and technologies presented are strongly bounded to the domain where the DTs are applied. This article proposes the FIWARE Ecosystem, combining its catalog of components and smart data models as a solution for the development of any DT. We also provide a use case to show how to use FIWARE for building DTs through a complete example of a parking DT. We conclude that the FIWARE Ecosystem constitutes a real reference option for developing DTs in any domain.