A Cloud-Edge Digital Twin Fpga-Based Smart Monitoring System for Power Electronics Applications

The implementation of digital twins can leverage the cloud computing paradigm to enable smartness capabilities on a physical asset, making the system self-aware of changes on the asset, and analytics capabilities to keep the system operating under a set of desired conditions. This paper presents a practical implementation of cloud computing to enhance digital twin capabilities for monitoring and controlling power electronics applications. The proposed architecture uses three layers: embedded, edge and cloud. The embedded Digital Twin, based on FPGA, controls a flyback converter that operates under voltage regulation tasks. Likewise, the edge layer synchronizes the embedded digital twin with the physical asset information and behavior. Finally, the cloud layer implemented on Amazon Web Services and communicated via MQTT protocol uses the information acquired by the edge layer to perform real-time analytics of the physical asset and digital twin. This application demonstrates the potential of combining edge and cloud-based Digital Twins to enhance real-time process management towards the implementation of a smart control engineering system (SCE).