The big picture

A bird’s eye view of a Digital Twin implementation that incorporates modern technological advancements could be depicted in the following figure. Clients are running the Digital Twin’s frontend that displays objects bound to backend entities. The front-end implementation uses “observable” constructs, adjusting displayed objects to “live” back-end queries. The backend implementation involves a sensor cloud that constantly updates a real-time database. The real-time database automatically pushes updates to every connected client.

flowchart client[Client] client <--> backend frontend <--> client realtime -.-> client subgraph DigitalTwin [Digital Twin] frontend[Frontend] subgraph backend [Backend] realtime[Realtime Database] subgraph SensorCloud [Sensor Cloud] sensors[Various Sensors
Existing APIs
Other DT
...] end end SensorCloud --> realtime end

The javascript programming language seems the reasonable way to go regarding the development of a cross-platform frontend. There are well-established javascript frameworks (Angular, React, Vue, etc.) that provide modern tools for any development target, i.e., for web, mobile web, native mobile, and native desktop. Significantly, bindings are available to stable and established javascript libraries like Mapbox, Google Maps, or ArcGIS API.

We can implement the real-time nature of the backend database by utilizing technologies like Google’s Firebase or the change streams feature of MongoDB. Both approaches should incorporate their front-end counterpart that implements the “observable” constructs that adjust to the ever-changing backend entities (e.g., the Angular Firebase library or the native MongoDB driver for Node.js and the socket IO library).