Résumé
Digital Twins (DTs) are key to Industry 4.0 and IoT systems. By definition, as virtual counterparts of a Physical Object (PO), they have to be kept up-to-date with the PO at a fast pace, leading to multiple reconfigurations, reconnections and redeployments throughout their lifetime. On the one hand, there is a growing interest around DT platforms and DT modeling languages from both academia and industry. However, systematic operational methodologies and practical tools for managing DTs resources and life cycle are more scarce. This paper identifies the need for a domain-agnostic solution to systematically manage the DT life cycle. On the other hand, GitOps provides principles and concrete actionable tools, such as CI/CD pipelines, declarative cluster state and version control, to manage software architectures that needs to: (1) be redeployed swiftly without interruptions and, (2) be versioned. By combining the static Digital Twin Definition Language and the GitOps framework, a new way of automating life cycle management of DTs at runtime is proposed in this paper. A conceptualization of core DT life cycle operations at runtime such as connect, synchronize, or configure and a similar work on generic GitOps operations is provided. Then, a mapping from DT to generic GitOps operations is proposed. Finally, a proof-of-concept involving a Fischertechnik Training Factory 4.0 as a use-case is presented.