After successful completion of the course, students are able to have a sound understanding, how to apply and design digital twins for a large variety of business sectors such as networking, industries, buildings, cities, farming and transport.
The value of mathematical modeling is, to understand the intrinsic mechanisms of every property of interest has a very long history. But since there exist extremely powerful digital processing units, these models can be used for real-time support using time-stamped synchronization. Digital twins are mirror processes, one is a model, the other is the physical reality such as an object, process or environment. The principle was developed during the moon landing preparation activities of Apollo 13 in the sixties by NASA. In a publication of Michael Grieves and John Vickers the name digital twin appears in 2001 for the time. Today, digital twins are used in nearly all business sectors. SDN-Twin (software-defined-networking with digital twins) is a revolutionary new approach in IP and special-purpose networking.
SDN-Twin is a distributed network computer system, operating in a bounded geographical switching area, to manage data traffic flows as its clients. In this function, this a computer system that managed an universal content-transparent physical network for arbitrary purposes. This ranges from organizational, strategic, social, logical, computer to telecommunications networks.
With respect to the clients of this universal network structure, all end-to-end flow clients can be considered as digital twin flows. Understanding this, opens a new dimension of flow communication. Protocols as digital twins at each end, can easily negotiate which option, implementation or version would fit best. A typical example is TCP (transmission control protocol) that ensures reliable, ordered, and error-checked delivery communications and has numerous forms of implementations. An other example is RTP (real-time transmission protocol) in which one can not only negotiate the used payload format, but also various protocol parameters.
Software-defined-networking with digital twins is a complete new way of networking for many kinds of networks. Teaching this new method can only be effective when at least all major issues are addressed. There must be a fast and steep learning curve. This new topic is covered in a set of optional lectures for which one can collect additional credits. In the Master and PhD programs, there is not a need to collect so many credits. In fact, this is a complete special topic study embedded in a collection of voluntary lectures. In order that attendees interested to be trained in all aspects of SDN-Twin networks can profit, an appropriate mode of examination will be introduced.
The examination will be performed as special examination events with additional audience in lecture room EI 7 during lecture-free days after and before a semester. In addition, also such events in smaller rooms will be organized on request. Both in WS and SS there are SDN-Twin lectures. On the SDN-Twin homepage, additional information will be available to prepare for the examination questions. In each semester, candidates can take an exam for up to 4 visited lectures with an assigned topic consisting of a written report (about 20 pages), a presentation (20 minutes) and answering questions on the content of the lectures indicated in the exam registration (10 minutes). Each visited optional lecture will be honoured by 3 ECTS, so that also all surplus optional lectures will appear as certificate for the special SDN-Twin education. Of course listeners are welcome to attend all examination events.
