Developing a Digital Ecosystems to Support Digital Twins: The Design and Application of Convene Systems

This praxis develops a model-based approach and software environment for constructing digital twins and their supporting digital ecosystems. The architecture comprises a simulation-capable digital representation of a particular real system, the physically realized system itself, and the digital threads that maintain correspondence between them. Those threads connect engineering definitions, observations, analyses, configuration changes, and verification evidence. Prediction, what-if analysis, change-impact assessment, and operational decision support are uses of this connected architecture rather than separate structural components. The systems engineering V provides a lifecycle reference for the twin’s coverage of requirements, design, realization, integration, verification, and validation; it does not prescribe the twin’s decomposition. The Digital Engineering Architecture Layer (DEAL) is the project-specific systems engineering design of that digital twin, expressed in SysML. It specifies the twin’s requirements, structure, behavior, interfaces, performance constraints, authoritative sources of truth, and digital-thread relationships, together with the digital ecosystem required to implement them. Convene provides the software environment in which the designed twin is configured, integrated, and operated. Its shared cloud platform and Web, Local, and Mobile products supply the allocated data, computation, interaction, and physical-interface services. The research follows an artifact-centered design science orientation and examines development in the RECLAIM context. The contribution pairs DEAL as the twin’s model and design with Convene as its execution environment. The available record supports model definition and software construction, while comparison of engineering benefits and validation for particular uses require further empirical evidence. The evaluation framework distinguishes the project DEAL, the separate Convene product architecture, the configured twin, and the evidence produced by its operation. RECLAIM’s proprietary process science remains outside the research object.