Toward Model-Driven Digital Twin Configuration: Separating Structure Semantics and Runtime with SysML SAREF and Ditto
Energy communities, neighbourhoods that jointly produce, store, and consume electricity, increasingly rely on \emph{digital twins}: live software copies of physical devices such as a solar panel, a battery, or a heater, kept in sync for monitoring and control. Setting up such a twin is today mostly manual: an engineer hand-writes a configuration whose field names are arbitrary, whose units are implicit, and which carries no machine-readable description of how devices relate, so other systems cannot reliably interpret it. This position paper argues that the task should be split across three complementary tools, each doing what it does best: a modelling language for the system's structure (SysML), a standard energy vocabulary for its meaning (SAREF4ENER), and a digital-twin platform for the running representation (Eclipse Ditto, via the W3C Web-of-Things Thing Description). We give conceptual rules (not yet an executable generator) for deriving a Ditto configuration from a SysML model annotated with that vocabulary, illustrate them on a greenhouse energy-community node modelled in Modelio, and argue that the split improves traceability and configuration consistency, and establishes the semantic hooks needed for interoperability, over hand-written alternatives. We scope the contribution to design-time configuration and discuss its limits.