Using Petri Nets for Digital Twins Modeling and Deployment: A Power Wheelchair System Case Study

Ideally, safety-critical systems should be designed to avoid or be resilient in handling failures that may occur during their lifetime. For dependability purposes, IEC 62551 provides guidance on using the Petri net formalism for modeling and analysis of systems. Another concept that has been considered to ensure the reliability of systems and contribute to their overall safety is the digital twin (DT). A DT is a virtual counterpart that is seamlessly linked to a physical asset, both relying on data exchange for mirroring each other. DT has been used for the tracking, management, maintenance, and optimization of different systems. In some implementations, the DT emphasizes only the geometric models and their animation. To fully benefit from their usage, considering associated behavioral models is of paramount importance to allow full validation of the system. This paper proposes the application of Input-Output Place-Transition Petri Nets (IOPT-nets) to model and deploy both the physical and the virtual entities of the DT, contributing to a comprehensive use of Petri nets in the development of systems. The case study presented concerns the development of digital twins for power wheelchair systems using the IOPT-Tools framework to specify, validate, and implement it.