Digital Twin (DT) technologies promise to remove cyber-physical barriers in systems and services and provide seamless management of distributed resources effectively. Ideally, full-fledged instantiations of DT offer bi-directional features for physical-virtual representations, tackling data governance, risk assessment, security and privacy protections, resilience, and performance, to name a few characteristics. More broadly, Federated Digital Twins (FDT) are distributed physical-virtual counterparts that collaborate for enacting synchronisation and accurate mapping of multiple DT instances. In this work we focus on understanding and conceptualising the cyber-physical and business perspectives using FDT in multinational and multimodal transportation systems. These settings enforce a plethora of regulations, compliance, standards in the physical counterpart that must be carefully considered in the virtual mirroring. Our aim is to discuss the regulatory and technical underpinnings and, consequently, the existing operational and budgetary overheads to factor in when designing or operating FDT.

翻译：数字孪生（DT）技术有望消除系统与服务中的信息物理壁垒，实现对分布式资源的高效无缝管理。理想状态下，成熟的数字孪生实例应具备物理-虚拟双向映射能力，涵盖数据治理、风险评估、安全隐私保护、系统弹性与性能等多重特征。更广泛而言，联邦数字孪生（FDT）是由多个分布式物理-虚拟对应体构成的协作体系，通过同步机制实现多数字孪生实例的精确映射。本研究聚焦于跨国多式联运系统中基于FDT的信息物理与商业视角的理解与概念化构建。此类场景在物理端涉及大量法规、合规要求与标准体系，必须在虚拟映射过程中予以审慎考量。本文旨在探讨相关监管与技术基础，进而分析在设计与运行FDT时需纳入考量的既有运营成本与预算开销。