Agents and Digital Twins for the engineering of Cyber-Physical Systems: opportunities, and challenges

Digital Twins (DTs) are emerging as a fundamental brick of engineering Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), but their notion is still mostly bound to specific business domains (e.g. manufacturing), goals (e.g. product design), or applications (e.g. the Internet of Things). As such, their value as general purpose engineering abstractions is yet to be fully revealed. In this paper, we relate DTs with agents and multiagent systems, as the latter are arguably the most rich abstractions available for the engineering of complex socio-technical and CPSs, and the former could both fill in some gaps in agent-oriented software engineering and benefit from an agent-oriented interpretation—in a cross-fertilisation journey.