Process control using digital twins

Control method of running an event-driven control process in a digital twin domain for control of process entities operated in a process domain, wherein in the digital twin domain the behavior of process entities is modeled through execution of state machine models, the control method operating in processing cycles to continuously execute

• a step of asynchronously receiving event data created with respect to process entities in the process domain and/or event data created through execution of state machine models in the digital twin domain and of storing received event data in an inbound buffer;
• a step of distributing received event data from the inbound buffer to a process cycle buffer at the beginning of every process cycle, wherein every distributed event datum is represented in the process cycle buffer as an input state according to an instance of a state in a relevant state machine model that maps to the event datum;
• a step of executing a model-based control process for control of selected process entities by reading at least one input state from the process cycle buffer as stored for the processing cycle and of operating at least one relevant state machine model to reflect the input of at least one input state such that the state machine model can transit from at least one source state to at least one target state through execution of at least one state transition activity under the condition that a pre-determined state transition condition is met, wherein the state transition condition models a state context reflecting a co-existence of a pre-determined set of states in one or more state machine models across the digital domain during run time;
• a step of checking whether the operation of the at least one relevant state machine model triggers an external control operation in the process domain;
• and
• a step of generating an external control command to instruct the external control operation in the process domain and of outputting the generated external control command to at least one process entity processing the external control command when the operation of the at least one relevant state machine model triggers the external control operation.