Digital Catapult > Unlocking the Power of Digital Twin Communication

Blog

Unlocking the Power of Digital Twin Communication

Posted 18 Jun 2025

Why Twin-to-Twin Communication Matters

Imagine a future where digital twins – digital replicas of real-world systems – not only monitor and optimise individual assets but also collaborate with one another to solve shared challenges. That’s the vision behind digital twin-to-digital twin (or “twin-to-twin”) communication.

For industries increasingly reliant on data-driven decision-making, this represents a significant opportunity. Think of smart cities, defence networks, or national infrastructure, domains where different systems must interact. Twin-to-twin communication could enable real-time coordination, improve forecasting, reduce duplication, and create efficiencies that benefit everyone involved.

Digital Catapult accelerates the practical application of deep tech, including the advancement of interoperable digital twin technologies. By enabling access to R&D capabilities and supporting early-stage deep tech businesses, we help bring transformative products and systems like these to market.

But there’s a challenge: digital twins are often built using different technologies, platforms and data standards. Without a common way for them to “talk,” collaboration is limited or impossible. That’s where messaging protocols come in.

This blog explores the case for a shared messaging schema, essentially a common set of rules or templates for how digital twins send and understand information, to support communication between digital twins, what it needs to do, why it matters, and how Digital Catapult’s exploring solutions at the UK Digital Twin Centre.

What Is a Digital Twin?

A digital twin is a dynamic virtual representation of a physical asset, process, or system, bridging the physical and digital worlds. The digital twin operates through a fully connected data flow between the physical asset and its virtual counterpart. Real-time data from the physical asset—collected via sensors, IoT devices, or manual inputs is continuously sent to the digital twin, allowing it to accurately reflect the asset’s current state, behaviour, and environment.

This allows businesses and organisations to simulate, predict, and optimise operations in real-time. From individual machines and vehicles to entire buildings or supply chains, digital twins give decision-makers a clearer picture and the ability to act faster.

But when these twins exist only in isolation, their usefulness is limited. Imagine if a weather app couldn’t receive satellite data or a fitness tracker couldn’t sync with your phone. Or a manufacturing plant twin couldn’t interact with a supplier’s logistics twin. Without a way for these systems to talk to each other clearly and reliably, critical opportunities are lost. That’s why the ability for digital twins to speak the same language isn’t just helpful, it’s essential. This is what we mean by interoperability: enabling different digital twins to exchange information and work together, even if they’re built by different organisations or exist in different domains.

The Problem: Communication Without a Common Language

As digital twins become more powerful, the need for collaboration grows. Today, most digital twins use bespoke, closed messaging systems. These work well in isolation but create major barriers when connecting different systems, especially those built by different vendors. That’s why the time is now to explore a standard messaging schema designed specifically for digital twins. It’s like agreeing on a shared protocol, so twins can collaborate without translation errors or compatibility issues.

Where Messaging Matters

When designing communication systems for digital twins, there are three key interaction types to consider:

Intra-twin

Communication within a single digital twin, between internal components like sensors, AI models, and user interfaces.

Exo-twin

External data inputs that inform the twin, such as weather forecasts, satellite data, or cybersecurity alerts.

Inter-twin

Communication between separate digital twins, such as a ship’s propulsion twin sharing performance data with a fleet-wide fuel efficiency twin.

It’s this third category – inter-twin communication – that holds the most transformative potential. But it’s also the most complex, requiring a shared foundation for interoperability.

What a Digital Twin Messaging Schema Needs to Do

A shared messaging schema must go beyond basic data transfer. It needs to support:

Real-time data exchange (e.g. telemetry, sensor data)
Control commands and task coordination
Trust and security between systems
Twin discovery and self-description
Collaborative planning and decision-making

In short, this is not just about sending messages, it’s about enabling intelligent systems to reason, plan, and act together.

Why Existing Messaging Protocols Fall Short

There are already well-established communication protocols in other domains:

gRPC – A low-latency, secure messaging protocol built by Google (gRPC, 2015)
MQTT – Designed for lightweight IoT messaging (ISO/IEC 20922:2016)
AMQP – A robust enterprise messaging solution (OASIS, 2012)

These all do an excellent job of transporting data reliably, ensuring the message is sent and received. But in digital twin communication, it’s not just about moving data. It’s about understanding what the data means.

Without agreed-upon semantics, different twins can’t interpret each other’s messages. That’s like having an international summit where everyone speaks different languages with no interpreter.

Learning from Healthcare: A Better Way to Communicate

One inspiring example comes from healthcare. In 2011, Graham Grieve proposed a new standard called FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) to unify fragmented health IT systems (FHIR History). FHIR works by treating data as structured resources, like a patient, diagnosis or appointment. Each resource has defined attributes and relationships. This resource-oriented approach helps ensure not only that data is exchanged, but that it’s understood.

For digital twins, something similar is needed: a shared schema that captures structure, meaning, and context in every message. And ideally, one that supports different industries and use cases.

Enter Ontologies and DTDL

To build such a schema, the “things” a twin knows about its properties, behaviour, and relationships need to be defined. This is where ontologies come in.

An ontology is a formal description of a domain, like a machine, building, or ecosystem, which can be shared, reused, and versioned. Microsoft’s Digital Twin Definition Language (DTDL), released in 2018, is a popular open standard for this purpose, allowing engineers to model physical systems in a way that machines can interpret consistently.

UK Digital Twin Centre: Building the Tools

To support twin-to-twin communication and interoperability, we’re building three key capabilities:

Integration through messaging middleware 

Our DTaaS Workbench (Digital Twin as a Service) leverages established middleware technologies to enable scalable, reliable communication between components and systems.

Collaborative domain modelling 

We’re developing low-code tools to help experts define ontologies, structured representations of the systems they want to model without needing to write code.

A standardised messaging schema 

Our DTIR project provides the shared language that digital twins need to communicate across vendors, platforms, and sectors. As digital twins become more powerful, the need for collaboration grows. Today, most digital twins use bespoke, closed messaging systems. These work well in isolation but create major barriers when connecting different systems, especially those built by different vendors. That’s why the time is now to explore a standard messaging schema designed specifically for digital twins. It’s like agreeing on a shared protocol, so twins can collaborate without translation errors or compatibility issues.

Why This Matters for You

For any business leader, policymaker or technologist exploring the role of digital twins in your organisation, interoperability should be high on your agenda. Without a shared communication framework, digital twins risk becoming siloed, duplicative and limited in value.

It’s not just about making systems smarter in isolation, it’s about connecting ecosystems, sharing intelligence, and solving problems collaboratively. Without a common messaging schema, like the one being developed at the UK Digital Twin Centre, those benefits are hard to achieve.

What’s Next?

If your organisation is looking to explore twin interoperability or just wants to better understand how digital twins can integrate into your operations, we’d love to talk.

At the UK Digital Twin Centre, we’re developing practical tools and open standards to help businesses adopt scalable, collaborative digital twin solutions. Whether you’re starting your twin journey or ready to scale, now is the time to consider how your digital twins will talk, collaborate, and evolve.

Get in touch with the UK Digital Twin Centre team to explore integration possibilities, pilot the DTaaS Workbench, or contribute to the development of Digital Twin Interoperability Resources.