Skip to content
EN FR

Designing governed digital twins

Documentation status: architecture. The source is a methodology-oriented book and includes design patterns; an adapter or prediction sketch does not by itself certify a released connector.

Follow the lifecycle, not the protocol list

  1. Define the decision: what operator question, risk or action makes the twin valuable?
  2. Represent the asset: identity, component structure, contexts, physical quantities and reference semantics.
  3. Connect sources: inventory OT/IoT systems and isolate protocol adapters behind a normalized observation contract.
  4. Synchronize evidence: validate units, timestamps, source identity, duplicates, validity/freshness and event ordering before updating current state.
  5. Reason and simulate: keep observations, current projections, anomaly predictions and what-if results distinguishable.
  6. Act under governance: bind actions to authorization, safety, human review and auditable confirmation.
  7. Operate the fleet: monitor drift, connectivity, latency, lifecycle and recovery; test failures rather than assuming uninterrupted telemetry.

Observation is not state

A sensor message is evidence from a particular source at an observation time. A twin's displayed “current temperature,” “operating mode” or “latest condition” is a projection with freshness and validity rules. A failed validation may still warrant keeping a suspect observation for diagnosis without making it authoritative current state.

Example: pump asset

Represent a pump's durable identity and components, map vibration and temperature observations to their physical sources, apply freshness and anomaly rules, then publish a recommendation or work order through an explicitly governed action. Prediction is not actuation; a decision to command physical equipment needs its own safety boundary.

Continue

Runtime services · Data and persistence · Events and processes · Neuro-symbolic governance

LaTeX sources: Designing Digital Twins with logiCells/digital-twin-method.tex, telemetry-events-and-state-updates.tex, end-to-end-pump-walkthrough.tex, actions-actuation-and-human-oversight.tex.