Architecture

IOTICS digital twins are not only a simple reflection of a “real” asset. In IOTICS, custom logic can be provided in the twin with the effect of managing the assets’ metadata, enhancing the behaviour of the real asset, compensate for its limitations, augment its state with supplementary data, process inbound data or events coming from other twins in IOTICS. 

This custom logic can be programmed to fit into existing ELT pipelines, as AI/ML, or deployed on prem or on cloud, according to the desired policies. Moreover it can provide state management to keep the “real” asset in sync with the twin.

Security is at the core of IOTICS. Real assets interactions are mediated by twins, acting as gateways. IOTICS security infrastructure allows twin interactions to be securely brokered by allowing each party to be in control of its own end of the interaction.

By using a data self sovereign approach, IOTICS allows to shift security to the edge and as such enabling interactions to occur in a trust-less environment. 

Brokered interactions consist of: discovery and access to a twin metadata, reading data from a digital twin and dispatching of commands to a digital twin.

IOTICS adopts a self sovereign approach to identity as such enabling verification of data provenance: assets can cryptographically verify what other asset has emitted the data even if the data is received by a twin.  

Assets metadata is managed independently by data and used to support brokered interactions or to provide semantics to real assets.

By allowing semantic modeling of their metadata assets, by means of their twins can interoperate autonomously as such enabling the implementation of increasingly sophisticated use cases. Twins can be used as simple abstraction layers that support a data centric approach, or as a data mesh or as multi agent systems.

After successful establishment of brokered interactions, data can be transferred with-in IOTICS using the streaming capabilities of the platform or transferred “out of platform”.

By virtue of this separation the metadata plane forms the enterprise assets knowledge base which becomes federated in case of data ecosystems where assets are semantically linked and logical inference can be applied to discover new relationships.

IOTICS provides a fully decentralized architecture that enables the formation of data ecosystems in a trust-less network. 

Participants can join an already existing data ecosystem by simply joining the network with their own IOTICSpace. By using semantics, interoperability and security is guaranteed “by design”. 

Participants can also manage their presence in the ecosystem according to their own data governance policies.

Decentralization also provides a way to scale ecosystems to a global reach.

IOTICS model allows streaming analytics driven by semantics: it’s unique find&bind approach allows to discover the data and assets that are relevant and access real time assets data for the assets that matter.

Since no data is stored in the platform, traditional analytics can be performed at the edge and as such optimising locally and transfer only insights or knowledge where they matter.

IOTICS leverages cloud to provide a low cost solution to hosting the IOTICSpace but allows leveraging existing investments by allowing deployment of custom logic on prem or wherever it makes sense 

Access to IOTICS middleware and semantic models is via standard web APIs; SDKs and libraries are provided to simplify and accelerate adoption.

A low code / no code approach to asset/twin modeling is provided via portal.

IOTICS uses W3C Decentralised IDs to identify digital twins, any applications implementing custom twin logic (agents) and users.

By using a secure mechanism of delegations, basic access control, provenance and authorisation is achieved. Custom access control rules are also implemented to provide fine grained access to support brokered interactions.

IOTICS uses Semantic Web technology and a data centric approach. Albeit brokered interactions are only viable within IOTICS, no data is locked in IOTICS. Assets models can be lifted and shifted out as appropriate or federated with existing data storages.