arXiv subjects

Alessandra Somma

Publications and source records attributed to Alessandra Somma.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Toward Federated Cognitive Digital Twins over the Edge-to-Cloud Continuum

Digital Twins (DTs) are increasingly adopted to monitor, analyze, and optimize Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) through continuous interaction between physical assets and their digital counterparts. However, current DT architectures often rely on centralized and monolithic designs, leading to scalability, latency, and resilience issues in distributed environment such as smart cities. Moreover, they provide limited support for semantic integration and high-level reasoning, reducing the effectiveness of DT-based decision-making. Recent studies on Federated Digital Twins (FDTs) have addressed scalability by decomposing complex systems into interacting twins, but they still largely centralize intelligence in cloud components. In parallel, Cognitive Digital Twins (CDTs) enhance DTs with semantic reasoning, explainability, and AI-driven decision support, yet they are typically difficult to integrate into distributed architectures. This paper proposes a Federated Cognitive Digital Twin (FCDT) architecture that combines federation and cognition within a unified approach. The architecture distributes intelligence across the edge-to-cloud continuum through local twins, which provide real-time monitoring and lightweight cognitive capabilities, and global twins, which perform system-level reasoning, simulation, and coordination. By integrating distributed autonomy with cognitive reasoning, the proposed approach improves scalability, responsiveness, and decision-making in complex distributed CPSs

cs.SE↗

arXiv2026

E-CoDrive: A Co-Simulation Framework for Testing Energy-Critical Driving Scenarios

Autonomous driving research has largely focused on safety while giving limited attention to non-functional aspects such as energy consumption and sustainability. As Autonomous Electric Vehicles (AEVs) become increasingly common in urban traffic, understanding how complex traffic dynamics influence their energy consumption is paramount to test whether AEVs can complete trips before battery depletion. To support energy-aware scenario-based testing of AEVs, we present E-CoDrive, a framework for reproducible closed-loop driving co-simulations that integrates an energy consumption model, a micro-traffic simulator, and a high-fidelity driving simulator to test AEV software stacks in urban scenarios. This tool paper describes the architecture of E-CoDrive and demonstrates its applicability by testing an Autoware-based AEV stack. Our evaluation shows that varying traffic conditions produce substantial differences in vehicle energy consumption. The artifact is publicly available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.32244783, and a screencast showing the tool is available at https://youtu.be/yX9fWHqCvgc.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2025

TwinArch: A Digital Twin Reference Architecture

Background. Digital Twins (DTs) are dynamic virtual representations of physical systems, enabled by seamless, bidirectional communication between the physical and digital realms. Among the challenges impeding the widespread adoption of DTs is the absence of a universally accepted definition and a standardized DT Reference Architecture (RA). Existing state-of-the-art architectures remain largely domain-specific, primarily emphasizing aspects like modeling and simulation. Furthermore, they often combine structural and dynamic elements into unified, all-in-one diagrams, which adds to the ambiguity and confusion surrounding the concept of Digital Twins. Objective. To address these challenges, this work aims to contribute a domain-independent, multi-view Digital Twin Reference Architecture that can help practitioners in architecting and engineering their DTs. Method. We adopted the design science methodology, structured into three cycles: (i) an initial investigation conducting a Systematic Literature Review to identify key architectural elements, (ii) preliminary design refined via feedback from practitioners, and (iii) final artifact development, integrating knowledge from widely adopted DT development platforms and validated through an expert survey of 20 participants. Results. The proposed Digital Twin Reference Architecture is named TwinArch. It is documented using the Views and Beyond methodology by the Software Engineering Institute. TwinArch website and replication package: https://alessandrasomma28.github.io/twinarch/ Conclusion. TwinArch offers practitioners practical artifacts that can be utilized for designing and developing new DT systems across various domains. It enables customization and tailoring to specific use cases while also supporting the documentation of existing DT systems.

cs.SE↗