Towards a Stateless Cloud Native and Cloud Agnostic Digital Twin Platform for the Digital Product Passport: Out-of-the-box, Reliable, and Scaling

Interoperable digital twins (DT) simplify and automate the implementation of Industry 4.0 (I4.0) use cases like Collaborative Condition Monitoring (CCM), Product and Corporate Carbon Footprint (PCF, CCF) and the Digital Product Passport (DPP) - aiming at adaptivity, resource-efficiency, user-friendliness, compliance with legal requirements and value-creation. Platforms accelerate the development and deployment of DTs and services and ensure their resilient operation in order to capture especially all relevant shop-floor information, for example to aggregate PCFs, CCFs, and DPPs or to report on sustainability - automatically. However, platform operators should in particular avoid cloud provider lock-ins to be able to react flexibly to use case requirements at any time. The technology must be manageable and costs must be controllable. The aim is to achieve a break-even point between security, costs, future viability and controllability, short implementation time and motivated use. Such requirements can currently only be met with cloud infrastructures. An agnostic design ensures that switching infrastructures is possible and can be done both securely and quickly. To this end, this paper develops an out-of-the-box cloud native and cloud agnostic DT platform providing specialized, stateless, loosely coupled DT services interacting within a service mesh. The developed platform meets the requirements, can easily be executed in any public, private and hybrid cloud, and can be scaled horizontally without any further ado.