Presented at the 35th Annual INCOSE Symposium, July 2025
Building digital twins is a cross-disciplinary endeavor, combining the efforts of modelers, system engineers, data analysts, UX designers and domain experts. For digital twins to be able to evolve with their paired, real-world system, the artifacts associated with these various disciplines must remain synchronized and coherent throughout the digital twin lifecycle. We provide a paradigm for harmonizing this multi-disciplinary effort using an Authoritative Broker of Truth (ABoT) process and apply this paradigm to a real-world case study: Can I ‘cut the cord’ on my cable provider and receive free over-the-air television?
ABoT provides the processes and data organization needed to build, utilize and evolve a digital twin. Our approach is vendor-neutral, cross-discipline, and allows the integration and versioning of dis-parate artifact types including code, documentation, operational measurements and simulation reports. ABoT is intended to be used across the full life cycle of a digital twin and to be useful to all digital twin stakeholders including digital engineers, system engineers, simulation and UX designers, project managers, and ultimately, the end user.
We chose a consumer-level use case and implemented our digital twin using open-source tooling so to be accessible to a broader audience. The ABoT paradigm could be utilized within a variety of tool suites and approach more sophisticated applications, for instance, communications mission planning within a hostile electromagnetic environment.