Digital twins—virtual models of physical assets—are increasingly vital across industries, but they often operate in isolated platforms, unable to communicate with each other. This fragmentation limits their potential, forcing businesses to build redundant data pipelines and missing opportunities for cross-system insights. A solution could involve creating a connectivity layer that allows digital twins from different platforms to interact seamlessly.

Breaking Down the Silos

The idea centers on three key components: a metadata registry where twins describe their capabilities, a translation engine to bridge different data formats, and a governance framework to manage access and data integrity. Unlike basic API gateways, this system would maintain active connections between twins, enabling real-time updates. For example, a factory’s digital twin could automatically adjust production schedules based on weather forecasts from a city’s climate twin, even if they run on different platforms.

Potential beneficiaries include:

• Industrial companies that use multiple vendors’ twins and want to reduce integration costs.
• Smart city operators looking to correlate data from traffic, energy, and other infrastructure twins.
• Platform vendors who could offer interoperability as a competitive edge.

Execution and Adoption

One way to approach this could start with a minimal viable product (MVP) featuring an open metadata standard and connectors for a few major platforms, demonstrating basic cross-platform alerts. Later phases could introduce state synchronization, governance tools, and AI-assisted translation. To encourage platform vendors to participate, the solution could be framed as an enhancement to their existing APIs rather than a replacement.

Existing efforts like Siemens Xcelerator or PTC ThingWorx focus on their own ecosystems, while this idea aims to be platform-neutral. It could fill a gap similar to how TCP/IP standardized internet communication, but for digital twins.

Key challenges include vendor resistance and technical hurdles like real-time synchronization. However, with a phased rollout and industry collaboration, this could evolve into a foundational layer for interconnected digital twins.