Connectionists: CfP: Special issue Autonomous, Context-Aware, Adaptive Digital Twins

[gcabri@unimore.it]

*Special issue Autonomous, Context-Aware, Adaptive Digital Twins*

/Computers in Industry (Elsevier)/

//

/Scope: /

Digital Twins are quickly becoming an important concept in the digital 
representation of manufacturing assets, products, and other resources. 
As comprehensive digital representations of physical assets, comprising 
their design and configuration, state, and behaviour, Digital Twins 
provide information about and services based on their physical 
counterpart’s current condition, their history and even their predicted 
future. As such, they can be considered the building blocks of a vision 
of future Digital Factories in which stakeholders collaborate via the 
information Digital Twins provide about physical assets in the factory 
and throughout the product lifecycle.

Besides their potential to facilitate collaboration based on information 
about their physical counterparts, Digital Twins also hold promise to 
contribute to more flexible and resilient Digital Factories. To fulfil 
this promise, Digital Twins will need to evolve from today’s 
expert-centric tools towards active entities that extend the 
capabilities of their physical counterparts. Required features include 
sensing and processing their environment and situation, pro-actively 
communicating with each other and with humans, taking their own 
decisions towards their own or cooperative goals, and adapting 
themselves and their physical counterparts to achieve those goals. That 
means, future Digital Twins should be /context-aware/,/autonomous/, and 
/adaptive/.

This Special Issue intends to highlight research contributing to the 
evolution of Digital Twins towards context-aware, autonomous, and 
adaptive building blocks of tomorrow’s Digital Factories. Contributions 
should address research gaps that need to be bridged to achieve that 
objective. Four interwoven research topics are especially relevant in 
this context: 1) interoperability, 2) modelling, 3) interaction and 4) 
real-time data processing and decision-making. More details about this 
vision and the related research gaps are available in the 
state-of-the-art paper “Autonomous, Context-Aware, Adaptive Digital 
Twins – State of the Art and Roadmap” in Computers in Industry Volume 
133 (December 2021), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compind.2021.103508 
<https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compind.2021.103508>.

Contributions should address one or more of the four topics and deal 
with issues including, but not limited to, the following:

●Integration and interoperability of context information with Digital Twins

●Harmonisation of Digital Twins with the IoT paradigm

●Lifecycle-wide interoperability with Digital Twins

●Standards and protocols for interoperability of Digital Twins

●Context models for Digital Twins

●Context-aware integration aggregation of Digital Twins

●Relation of agent and holon models to Digital Twins

●Granularity of Digital Twins

●Transition of business goals into adaptable plans

●Framework, reference models and integration with existing models e.g. 
RAMI 4.0

●Models of interaction and cooperation between Digital Twins and Humans

●Humans as part of the context of Digital Twins

●Borders between humans and autonomous Digital Twins

●Explainability and certification of Digital Twin models, simulations 
and predictions

●Real-time processing of context data by Digital Twins

●Time-constrained, near-optimal decision-making methods for Digital Twins

●Real-time handling of massive amounts of data by Digital Twins

●Methods for Digital Twins to handle Incomplete and noisy data streams

/Guest Editors:///

Giacomo Cabri <giacomo.cabri at unimore.it <mailto:giacomo.cabri at unimore.it>>

Department of Physics Informatics and Math

University of Modena and Reggio Emilia

Modena (Italy)

Web page: http://personale.unimore.it/rubrica/dettaglio/gcabri 
<http://personale.unimore.it/rubrica/dettaglio/gcabri>

Karl A. Hribernik < hri at biba.uni-bremen.de <mailto:hri at biba.uni-bremen.de>>

BIBA - Bremer Institut für Produktion und Logistik GmbH

Bremen (Germany)

Web page: 
https://www.biba.uni-bremen.de/en/institute/staff/homepage.html?nick=hri 
<https://www.biba.uni-bremen.de/en/institute/staff/homepage.html?nick=hri>

Federica Mandreoli <federica.mandreoli at unimore.it 
<mailto:federica.mandreoli at unimore.it>>

Department of Physics Informatics and Math

University of Modena and Reggio Emilia

Modena (Italy)

Web page: http://personale.unimore.it/rubrica/dettaglio/fmandreoli 
<http://personale.unimore.it/rubrica/dettaglio/fmandreoli>

Gregoris Mentzas <gmentzas at mail.ntua.gr>

School of Electrical and Computer Engineering

National Technical University of Athens

Athens (Greece)

Web page: https://www.ece.ntua.gr/en/staff/50 
<https://www.ece.ntua.gr/en/staff/50>

/Paper submission: /

//

The submission process is organised in two stages: 1) extended abstract 
submission and 2) full paper submission.Extended abstract submission and 
its acceptance are compulsory for full paper submission.

Extended abstracts must be not more than 3.000 characters (this amount 
excludes the characters in tables, figures, and references). These are 
to be sent directly via email to the Guest editors – not the Elsevier 
submission webpage of the journal. Please include all four email 
addresses below :

Giacomo Cabri <giacomo.cabri at unimore.it <mailto:giacomo.cabri at unimore.it>>

Karl A. Hribernik <gmentzas at mail.ntua.gr>

Federica Mandreoli <federica.mandreoli at unimore.it 
<mailto:federica.mandreoli at unimore.it>>

Gregoris Mentzas <gmentzas at mail.ntua.gr>

The guest editors will assess the appropriateness of the themes proposed 
and results to be presented as shown in the extended abstracts and will 
invite selected authors to submit full papers. The authors of the 
abstracts who are not selected will be notified accordingly.

If invited, full papers must be prepared by following the Computers in 
Industry guide for authors available at 
https://www.elsevier.com/journals/computers-in-industry/0166-3615/guide-for-authors 
<https://www.elsevier.com/journals/computers-in-industry/0166-3615/guide-for-authors>and 
submitted through the submission portal 
https://www.editorialmanager.com/comind/default1.aspx 
<https://www.editorialmanager.com/comind/default1.aspx>.

The dates for submission and notification are the following:

-extended abstract submission: December 8, 2021

-extended abstract acceptance notification: December 22, 2021

-full paper submission: March 31, 2022

-first round of review results: May 15 2022,

-revised papers due: June 30, 2022

Those papers that need a second revision, the expected decision date is 
August 31, 2022

-- 

|----------------------------------------------------|
| Prof. Giacomo Cabri - Ph.D., Full Professor
| Rector's Delegate for Teaching
| Dip. di Scienze Fisiche, Informatiche e Matematiche
| Universita' di Modena e Reggio Emilia - Italia
| e-mail giacomo.cabri at unimore.it
| tel. +39-059-2058320  fax +39-059-2055216
|----------------------------------------------------|