Simulation as a Service in Data Spaces: A Digital Twin-based Approach

Abstract The integration of Digital Twins with Data Spaces represents a significant opportunity for developing new value-added services across various domains. While both technologies are well-established individually, a comprehensive analysis of their integration potential and practical implementation guidelines remains necessary to unlock innovative service deployment scenarios. This paper addresses this gap by providing a thorough examination of available technologies, comparing Digital Twin frameworks and Data Space connectors, alongside detailed implementation guidance for service deployment. Technical specifications for connector implementation, data standardization, and policy enforcement are thoroughly detailed, offering valuable insights for industry practitioners. Through this analysis, we demonstrate how to leverage these technologies to enable real-time grid simulation as a service—a capability not yet available in current Data Space ecosystems. Our approach, built on the FIWARE platform, ensures interoperability through standardized data models and common vocabularies, providing a blueprint for practitioners to expose simulation services within Data Spaces. The framework’s effectiveness was validated in the energy domain, using the real-world infrastructure of the University of Murcia campus (Spain), where we successfully conducted Energy Demand Response assessment without compromising grid operations. This implementation, combined with our comprehensive technical guidelines and practical insights, establishes a clear pathway for operators to deploy simulation services within Data Spaces, fostering innovation across different infrastructure management scenarios.