Towards Declarative Deployment and Lifecycle Orchestration of Digital Twin Ecosystems

The deployment of Digital Twins (DTs) in heterogeneous Internet of Things (IoT) environments remains challenging due to protocol diversity, infrastructure complexity, and the absence of standardized methodologies. Existing solutions rely on ad-hoc architectures with manual configuration, limiting scalability and adaptability. This paper introduces DTDeployer, a platform for automated DT deployment and lifecycle management inspired by container orchestration. DTDeployer adopts a declarative configuration model, enabling users to define complex ecosystems through simple specification files, with automated provisioning of ingestion, processing, and output components. Key features include template-driven composability, multi-protocol data ingestion (HTTP, WebSockets, MQTT, AMQP, Kafka), integrated time-series storage, and developer-centric code generation for type-safe processing in Java and Python. By combining requirements analysis with a comprehensive architecture, this work establishes DTDeployer as a foundation for enterprise-grade DT deployments, lowering adoption barriers while supporting complex industrial applications.