VerDT: A Versatile Digital Twins Framework for UAVs-Based Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems

With the development of cyber-physical systems, Digital Twins (DT)-powered network autonomy is emerging to embrace the fifth-generation industrial revolution. In this context, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)-based low-altitude networks are expected to be the engines that drive industrial development. As an attractive industry application, UAVs-based intelligent logistics has been widely investigated to achieve a fully automated distribution manner without the aid of a workforce. However, it is difficult to perform real-time DT implementations due to limited computing resources and the high mobility of UAVs. To address the mentioned problems, we propose a Versatile DT (VerDT) framework operating at the edge. It can enable a double DT cooperation manner with a resource scheduling model and a path planning model for real-time and accurate logistics distributions. The resource scheduling model can implement the integration of computing and communication resources among UAVs for feasible cooperative distribution decisions. With the decisions, the path planning model can imitate to derive positions and velocities of UAVs for low-latency distribution performance with energy saving. Experiment results demonstrate the efficiency of our VerDT framework. Compared to state-of-the-art logistics distribution solutions, our solution reduces the distribution latency by 63.9% while improving the successful distribution ratio by 10.9%.