Smart Services in the Physical World: Digital Twins

Comprehensive, independently operating digital representations of physical assets, provisioned and manipulated through standardized interaction patterns, dissolve between the tangible and virtual world. Real-world developments are reflected in digital models and vice versa. The concept of digital twins combines these facets to integrated entities, specifying the description, appearance, and behavior of real-world entities in virtual models. This chapter explains how smart services enact as digital twins but also how they interact in flexible, loosely coupled networks.