As modular, digital twin-based simulation moves towards broader adoption, the need for interoperability becomes increasingly evident. To invest in a significant digital transformation, enterprises need assurance that their digital infrastructure will be meaningful and long lasting. There is a growing urgency for a stable, open-source framework and standard that can assure customers that their digital twins will be flexible enough to function in any context relevant to the physical twin and will not be locked into any single platform or workflow as their needs and use cases evolve.
While significant work has been done to delineate the requirements for a unified framework, a viable and agreed upon proposal has yet to gain traction. Currently available standards, while useful, tend to be highly domain specific, and therefore fall short of introducing true interoperability.
Several years of iterative work with our customers yielded a conclusion: a standard that prescribes how a digital twin will be used limits interoperability and adoption. Instead, we evolved a standard that can encapsulate all the data necessary for the utilization of a digital twin and can always be extended for specific domain utilization. This Universal Scene Description-based (USD) standard is information rich and highly extensible, and we have labeled it the Digital Twin Encapsulation Standard (DTES).
On November 29th, 2023, we presented our paper outlining DTES to the wider simulation community at the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) 2023. The aim of this paper is to introduce this standard in detail and explore how it has evolved through real-world engagements and insights. It illustrates how an encapsulation approach can make digital twins simulation-ready regardless of the chosen execution environment. We expand on the levels of data organization and their associated properties and invite the simulation community to review, challenge, adopt, test, and evolve this proposed standard through a collaborative process.
Read the paper here: The Digital Twin Encapsulation Standard: An Open Standard Proposal for Simulation-Ready Digital Twins
For further DTES work, visit the DTES GitHub
