1st Workshop on Compositionality for Digital Twins

The 1st 1-Week Workshop on Compositionality for Digital Twins at the Bellairs Research Institute of McGill University in Holetown, Barbados, is taking place from Friday, January 12th, 2024 to Friday, January 19th, 2024 with a special emphasis on compositionality in the context of digital twins.

Digital twins promise tremendous potential for gaining insights, optimize operations, and improve decision-making for cyber-physical systems across various industries, including manufacturing, healthcare, transportation, and more. Recent developments show that MDE can play a central role in systematically leveraging the potential of digital twins, and many researchers from the MDE community have applied MDE technology to build digital twins in recent years.

However, software engineering practices for building digital twins are only in their infancy. One crucial property for building software, but even more so for building digital twins, is compositionality. A compositional approach would allow for the creation of digital twins from individual components, which can then be combined further to reason about larger systems. This scalability is essential when dealing with systems of significant size, e.g., smart cities or ecosystems.

The modelling-related Bellairs workshop series have traditionally had a strong focus on software composition and modularity (aspect-oriented modelling (2010, 2011, 2012, 2013), concern-oriented modelling (2015, 2017), interfaces for software reuse (2018), polyglotism (2023)), but also on the interplay of data and models (data and models (2019, 2020), feedback-driven decision making (2022)). We therefore want to dedicate the upcoming Bellairs workshop on investigating the compositionality of digital twins.

We expect the workshop to be highly interactive and open-minded, with the main objective to reflect on the composition of data and of models, as well as investigate in more detail how to propagate uncertainty across digital twin boundaries, striving towards the elaboration of interfaces for digital twin composition.