A Method for Deriving Technical Requirements of Digital Twins as Industrial Product-Service System Enablers

Industrial Product-Service Systems (IPSS) are increasingly dominant in several sectors. Predominant value-adding services provided for industrial assets such as production systems, electric power plants, and car fleets are remote asset maintenance, monitoring, control, and reconfiguration. IPSS designers lack methods and tools supporting them in systematically deriving technical design requirements for the underlying Cyber-Physical System (CPS) IPSS services. At the same time, the use of Digital Twins (DTs) as digital representations of CPS assets is becoming increasingly feasible thanks to powerful, networked information technology (IT) and operation technology (OT) infrastructures and the ubiquity of sensors and data. This paper proposes a method for guiding IPSS designers in the specification and implementation of DT instances to serve as the key enablers of IPSS services. The systematic mapping of the continuous IT design-build-deployment cycle concept to the OT domain of CPS is at the heart of the applied methodology, which is complemented by a stakeholder-driven requirements elicitation. The key contribution is a structured method for deriving technical design requirements for DT instances as IPSS. This method is validated on real-world use cases in an evaluation environment for distributed CPS IPSS.