Middleware for Digital Twins: A Systematic Mapping Study.

Digital twins (DTs) are becoming a groundbreaking concept to support Industry 4.0, but their potential reaches various other domains, such as healthcare and smart cities. Several challenges arise to enable DTs, which require underlying middleware with advanced services to support the complexities of managing the virtual replicas of real-world entities. In this scenario, this work investigates which middleware strategies and technologies are used for DTs. We carried out a systematic mapping study that analyzed 13 primary studies on middleware for DTs. We shed light on the current state of the art and discuss research opportunities to evolve middleware to support DTs, especially regarding data management, integration, intelligence, management, and security.