Modeling Digital Twin Data and Architecture: A Building Guide with FIWARE as Enabling Technology

The use of Digital Twins in the industry has become a growing trend in recent years, allowing to improve the lifecycle of any process by taking advantage of the relationship between the physical and the virtual world. Existing literature formulates several challenges for building Digital Twins, as well as some proposals for overcoming them. However, in the vast majority of the cases, the architectures and technologies presented are strongly bounded to the domain where the Digital Twins are applied. This article proposes the FIWARE Ecosystem, combining its catalog of components and its Smart Data Models, as a solution for the development of any Digital Twin. We also provide a use case to showcase how to use FIWARE for building Digital Twins through a complete example of a Parking Digital Twin. We conclude that the FIWARE Ecosystem constitutes a real reference option for developing DTs in any domain.