Automated Simulation and Virtual Reality Coupling for Interactive Digital Twins

Abstract

While there are many efforts to simulate technical systems in virtual environments and provide a visual interaction for applications such as training, authoring and analysis, the process of generating applications still requires a lot of manual work. This is particularly critical in the context of interactive Digital Twins for resilience, where uncertain events can occur and every malfunction or mistreatment of any part of the system needs to be modeled. This paper presents an approach to model such systems in a modular way by automating the generation of its components for a game engine and simulators based on a common specification. Component instances are then synchronized bidirectionally across applications to achieve interaction between the game engine and simulators. An example hydraulic system is implemented and tested to demonstrate our approach, which needs minimal manual work by using predefined components. The solution can be extended by integrating more components and simulations.