Our paper Engineering Automotive Digital Twins on Standardized Architectures: A Case Study, co-authored with colleagues at McMaster Centre for Software Certification (McSCert) has been accepted for this year’s International Conference on Engineering Digital Twins (EDTConf).
The work was led by two of our outstanding graduate students, Stefan Ramdhan and Winnie Trandinh, who are supervised by colleagues Vera Pantelic and Mark Lawford. Stefan and Winnie started this project in our graduate course on Engineering Digital Twins.
This work is the systematic report on how the ISO 23247 digital twin reference architecture can be adapted for automotive digital twins.
Abstract. Digital twin (DT) technology has become of interest in the automotive industry. There is a growing need for smarter services that utilize the unique capabilities of DTs, ranging from computer-aided remote control to cloud-based fleet coordination. Developing such services starts with the software architecture. However, the scarcity of DT architectural guidelines poses a challenge for engineering automotive DTs. Currently, the only DT architectural standard is the one defined in ISO 23247. Though not developed for automotive systems, it is one of the few feasible starting points for automotive DTs. In this work, we investigate the suitability of the ISO 23247 reference architecture for developing automotive DTs. Through the case study of developing an Adaptive Cruise Control DT for a 1/10th-scale autonomous vehicle, we identify some strengths and limitations of the reference architecture and begin distilling future directions for researchers, practitioners, and standard developers.
Preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18662.