OMiLAB: a Smart Innovation Environment for Digital Engineers
Abstract
The paper introduces a Smart Innovation Environment for the devel-opment of Digital Twins and experimentation related to digital transformation projects, thus consolidating the "Digital Engineer" skill profile (with a business-oriented facet labelled as "Digital Innovator"). In the Internet of Things (IoT) era, this profile implies not only the ability to perform both digital design and engi-neering activities, but also to semantically bridge multiple layers of abstraction, granularity or technical specificity – from high level business analysis down to cyber-physical engineering. In the paper's proposal, conceptual modelling meth-ods and interoperable modelling environments are tailored to enable such inte-gration through the creation of Digital Twins, as assets or manifestations of dig-ital business models resulting from innovation processes.
The architecture of the proposed environment is guided by a Design Research perspective – i.e., we introduce it as a treatment to an education "design problem" regarding the Digital Engineer skill profile in the IoT era. The integrated skillset corresponding to this profile requires facilitators for Innovation Co-creation, Dig-ital Twin development and Agile Engineering of both software services and cyber-physical systems. The proposed environment encompasses workspaces and resource packages acting as such enablers, currently evaluated in "innovation corners" deployed across the Open Models Laboratory digital ecosystem.