Call for Papers

Despite the rapid growth of digital twin (DT) applications in domains such as manufacturing, robotics, smart grids, and healthcare, the software engineering foundations of DTs remain fragmented. Current DT development often combines domain models, simulators, data pipelines, runtime monitors, AI components, and deployment infrastructure in ad-hoc ways. Model-based engineering provides important foundations, but there is still no broadly accepted development methodology for DT software. In particular, there is limited agreement on how to specify DT requirements, architect DT platforms, validate synchronization between the physical twin and the digital twin, manage DT evolution, assure AI-enabled DT behavior, or operate DTs through continuous deployment pipelines. These are authentic software engineering challenges and are best addressed by the software engineering community.

To this end, we launch this workshop with the intent to build a community focusing on all aspects of the software portion of DTs.

Topics of interest

Topics of interest include but are not restricted to:

  • Software engineering methods, processes, and lifecycle models for DTs
  • Continuous software engineering (CSE), DevOps, MLOps, and TwinOps for DTs
  • Requirements engineering for DTs, uncertainty, runtime requirements, and stakeholder-facing requirements
  • Software architectures, reference architectures, architectural patterns, and anti-patterns for DT systems
  • Complex architectures, such as federated DTs and systems-of-systems engineering
  • Programming languages, paradigms, and frameworks
  • Testing, verification, and validation of DT software
  • Non-functional properties of DT software and their certification and assurance, e.g., safety, security, privacy, trust, ethics, and sustainability
  • Deployment, monitoring, observability, and maintenance of DT software
  • AI for DT engineering and DTs for AI-enabled physical systems
  • Human factors, human interaction with DT software, including visualization, explainability, dashboards, and decision support
  • Artifacts such as exemplars, datasets, benchmarks, code repositories, tools, and open-source DT platforms
  • Empirical studies, industrial experience reports, metrics, and evaluation methods for DT engineering

The anticipated outcome of the workshop is a concrete research agenda for DT software engineering. We plan to close the workshop with a community discussion that identifies priority research questions, promising artifacts, opportunities for collaboration, and possible future editions of the workshop.

Paper format

We solicit the following types of papers.

  • Full research papers (max. 8 pages): presenting novel research contributions
  • Short papers (max. 5 pages), presenting works in progress, preliminary results, new ideas, and tools

Note: page limits include references.

Formatting, submission, and review

All submissions must conform to the IEEE conference proceedings template, specified in the IEEE Conference Proceedings Formatting Guidelines. Most notably, use the \documentclass[10pt,conference]{IEEEtran} documentclass. The official IEEE Overleaf template is available here.

The HotCRP site for contributions will be announced shortly.

Submissions will undergo a single-blind process and be evaluated based on (1) relevance to the workshop and potential to generate stimulating discussions, (2) novelty (for research, education and position papers), and (3) presentation quality.

Presentations

TBA

Proceedings

The workshop proceedings will be published in ICSE 2027 Companion proceedings.