Digital twin

Within Bosch Semantic Stack, a digital twin is a digital replica of a physical asset, such as a machine, vehicle, product, or of a virtual or logical thing, such as machine type, product type, a server, a fact sheet etc.

Bosch Semantic Stack groups the data produced by this asset (or provided by other systems about this asset) into coherent pieces of information called aspects. For example, the digital twin of a spot welding machine could have aspects for measurements of the welding process, its maintenance status, and for its online status. The digital twin of a vehicle could have information about its movement, its environment, its engine, and its current configuration.

The Digital Twin exists as an entry in the Digital Twin Registry, i.e., the twin itself does not provide data about the asset. Instead, one or more aspects are associated with the Digital Twin in the Registry, each of which provides the actual data. Digital Twins can be registered, deleted and discovered, and aspects can be added to and removed from existing Digital Twins.

When adding an aspect to a Digital Twin in the Digital Twin Registry, the aspect’s endpoint for one of the supported aspect data transports (HTTP or MQTT) is added together with the unique identifier of the Aspect Model that describes the payload that is delivered by the endpoint.