Developing and Operating Digital Process Twins While Preserving Autonomy in CPS

Digital Twin (DT) technologies have proven effective in supporting the development of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). They enable the optimization of component and system design, including interaction behavior, through digital modeling and validation. Of particular interest are components that can share autonomy dynamically to determine the best fitting ones for required task accomplishments. When such mechanisms are put into physical operation, e.g., utilizing the Physical Internet, resource- and runtime particularities need to be addressed. Aside from real-time monitoring, relevant information for selecting proper resources needs to be prepared. In this contribution, we exemplify the implementation of sharing the autonomy of a robot component to accomplish a pick-up task as part of a smart packaging operation. We propose an architecture that allows to successively embed dynamic selection of proper resources for CPS operation through process-specific interaction patterns.