Simulation and Digital Twin Support for Managed Drone Applications

Abstract

As drone technology passes one milestone after the other, drones are used in an ever-increasing number of applications and are now considered as an integral part of the future smart city infrastructure. At the same time, the inherent safety and privacy risks associated with drone-based applications call for appropriate testing and monitoring tools. In this paper, we present a simulation environment and digital twin support for a platform that allows the managed execution of drone-based applications on top of a shared drone infrastructure. On the one hand, the simulation environment makes it possible to perform a wide range of tests regarding the operation of both the platform itself and the applications that run on top of it, before deploying them in the real world. On the other hand, after deployment, a digital twin of the drone is used to detect deviations of the application from the expected behavior, which, in turn, can serve as an indication of bugs that remained undetected during the simulation tests or malfunctions that occur at runtime. We discuss the most important elements of our approach and the simulation and digital twin components of the proposed system. Also, we provide a functional evaluation of our work by presenting its capabilities regarding both offline testing and runtime checking through indicative use cases. © 2020 IEEE.