The report Digital Twin Platform Design & Interface Specification introduced and analysed in detail the software architecture of the COGITO’s DTP. The DTP plays a central role in COGITO’s architecture, as it is responsible, not only for performing user management tasks but also for handling and processing all the incoming data traffic and for converting COGITO’s input data to suitable data formats for all the COGITO applications.

The DTP has been divided into six layers each serving a specific functional purpose:

  • The Authentication Layer to perform user management tasks according to the open-source project Keycloak’s specification.
  • The Data Ingestion Layer includes operational blocks for transforming the incoming data into ontology graphs and other necessary COGITO data structures.
  • The Data Persistence Layer provides data storage functionality.
  • The Data Management Layer responds to data requests from the COGITO applications, synchronising the multiple parallel responses to data queries from these applications in a fast and efficient manner.
  • The Messaging Layer coordinates data transformation operations and the responses to data queries from other COGITO applications.
  • The Data Post-processing Layer to perform Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) and model checking operations on COGITO’s BIM data.

A top-down approach was used to describe each component thoroughly, starting from an overview of operational blocks to a detailed description of software components; the data exchanged across these layers is also described.

Many components of the above layers (Data Post-processing Layer, Data Ingestion Layer, Data Management Layer) can act as standalone services enabling parallel executions in a highly containerised environment following a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) pattern. This is an efficient design approach, achieving minimum response time to queries of variable processing load. Furthermore, the communication among the different subcomponents of the DTP layers is performed in an efficient, transparent, and well-structured manner using an appropriate message routing scheme implemented within the Messaging Layer components.

The components of this initial design are not final, and they are expected to adapt to future updates and new requirements arising from other COGITO tools and applications. All the necessary changes will be performed in a timely fashion and will be reported in the final version of the report Digital Twin Platform Design & Interface Specification.

To know more details about the Digital Twin Platform Design & Interface Specification, follow the link HERE! All recent results of COGITO project are available in the Library of Public Deliverables.