Tagging Model Properties for Flexible Communication

Model-based systems engineering and digital manufacturing aim to facilitate monitoring, integration, and optimization of cyber-physical production systems (CPPS) through so-called “digital shadows”. In contrast to “digital twins”, digital shadows are purposefully abstracted models of information emitted by the underlying CPPS, hence they do not manipulate the system themselves. We present a method to derive digital shadows from design-time models that can be extended with sophisticated analyses and operate physically distributed without changing the original models. To this end, tag models assign communication information to properties of design-time models from which we generate an Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) based communication infrastructure that makes these accessible to other models. This enables the flexible integration and exchange of model information at runtime without polluting these with extra communication information. We present a tagging language for model communication description, a systematic method to apply this to design-time models, generation of a communication infrastructure, and their implementations with the MontiCore language workbench. This, ultimately, facilitates engineering physically distributed digital shadows and, hence, facilitates developing the interconnected CPPS of the future.