MADTwin: a framework for multi-agent digital twin development: smart warehouse case study

Abstract

A Digital Twin (DT) is a frequently updated virtual representation of a physical or a digital instance that captures its properties of interest. Incorporating both cyber and physical parts to build a digital twin is challenging due to the high complexity of the requirements that should be addressed and satisfied during the design, implementation and operation. In this context, we introduce the MADTwin (Multi-Agent Digital Twin) framework driven by a Multi-agent Systems (MAS) paradigm and supported by flexible architecture and extendible upper ontology for modelling agent-based digital twins. A comprehensive case study of a smart warehouse supported by multi-robots has been presented to show the feasibility and applicability of this framework. The introduced framework powered by intelligent agents integrated with enabler technologies enabled us to cope with parts of the challenges imposed by modelling and integrating Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) with digital twins for multi-robots of the smart warehouse. In this framework, different components of CPS (robots) are represented as autonomous physical agents with their digital twin agents in the digital twin environment. Agents act autonomously and cooperatively to achieve their local goals and the objectives of the whole system. Eventually, we discuss the framework’s strengths and identify areas of improvement and plans for future work.