An Adaptable Digital Twin Architecture for Smart and Interoperable Electrical Roads

This paper proposes a modular and interoperable Digital Twin (DT) architecture compatible with large-scale road networks, leveraging standard-based technologies to support re-producible, scalable, and distributed deployments. Although scalability, interoperability, and real-time responsiveness are widely acknowledged as essential, most existing DT solutions address these challenges in isolation. The proposed architecture mitigates these limitations by focusing on road network-specific constraints, such as continuous real-time data flows, heterogeneous service integration, and edge-cloud coordination. We implement this architecture using open-source technologies, ensuring reproducibility across domains and suitability for diverse applications. The contribution of our work is the proposed architecture and we validate it through our performance evaluation, by testing several DT-oriented frameworks. The evaluation includes time distribution latency measurements following a realistic edge-oriented scenario. The results confirm the suitability of the proposed architecture for scalable, interoperable, and extensible DT deployments, while providing guidance for future implementations.