Knowledge Graphs as Enhancers of Intelligent Digital Twins

Cyber-Physical Systems, characterized by networking capabilities and digital representations, offer many promising potentials for industrial automation. In an attempt to further enrich the system's digital representation by incorporating interdisciplinary models and considering a continuous and synchronized representation of it within the cyber layer, the concept of the Digital Twin emerged, enabling system monitoring, virtual commissioning, failure diagnosis and simulations by managing the Cyber-Physical Systems data along its lifecycle. To add further intelligence into the Digital Twin, the architecture of the intelligent Digital Twin was proposed. Nevertheless, managing and relating the complex and dynamic digital models as well as the heterogeneous data of the intelligent Digital Twin present open challenges. Due to their inherent extensibility and adaptability as well as their semantic expressiveness, Knowledge Graphs are a suitable concept to overcome these challenges and enable reasoning to gain new insights. Prominent applications of Knowledge Graphs are recommendation systems and exploratory search within the semantic web. However, there seems to be a lacking yet potential applicability for Knowledge Graphs in the industrial domain. Therefore, this contribution proposes a Knowledge Graph enhanced architecture of the intelligent Digital Twin, offering capabilities, which are internal linking and referencing, knowledge completion, error detection, collective reasoning and semantic querying. Based on the proposed concept, potential application fields for Knowledge Graph enhanced intelligent Digital Twin are addressed.