The 1st International Workshop on Middleware for Digital Twins (Midd4DT)
held in conjunction with the 24th ACM/IFIP International Middleware Conference, Bologna, Italy, 11th – 15th December 2023

Background and Motivation
Nowadays, the concept of Digital Twin (DT) is used in a wide variety of domains such as manufacturing, healthcare, smart cities, smart agriculture, smart grids, and mechanical engineering, to enhance the performance, enable proactive maintenance to extend the physical system’s life, enhanced productivity, and faster innovation with reduced costs. Typically, the digital twin systems are generated and then synchronized using data flows in both directions between the real-world physical components and their virtual replica counterparts. Furthermore, a digital twin can enable continuous prototyping, and testing on-demand, without interruption, assuring and self-optimizing the forthcoming 5G network and beyond. It creates virtual replicas of IoT devices in various application scenarios and maintains a device twin for every connected device.
Furthermore, Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) middleware, service-oriented middleware, and many other middleware modernization approaches are providing a Virtual Automation Bus (VAB) to offer end-to-end connectivity between physical assets and the digital twin through many heterogeneous communication protocols, brokers, and messaging services, while ensuring interoperability among heterogeneous protocols and facilitating cross-layer interaction with the digital twin through VAB.
Topics and Scope
The main goal of this workshop is to address these challenges and present advanced and innovative tools, techniques, models, architectures, specifications, architectures and algorithms that bring diverse middleware technologies to DT in IoT applications and services. Contributions addressing both theoretical and practical applications, including, but not limited to, the following topics, are welcome for submission:
All Middleware aspects for DT in the Internet of things
Data-centric middleware based digital twin platform
Digital twin through Industrial IoT middleware
Modeling digital twin data and architecture
Specification, standardization, and Simulation efforts in middleware for digital twins
Digital Twin standardization, interoperability, and representation
Ontology-based modeling, linking, relationship and composition for Digital Twin
Ontology-Defined Middleware and conceptual frameworks for Digital Twin
DT-enabled Model Driven Engineering
Edge-Cloud Continuum Digital Twin Middleware modeling and development
Networking, orchestration, and communication middleware for Digital Twin
Middleware framework for DT in Robotics, ROS, and Human–Robot Interactions
Recent Developments and Future Perspectives of DT-enabled middleware
Application of the digital twin in multi-dimensional intelligent and future industry
Digital Twins in the Era of Web of Things: architectures and application scenarios
Digital Twin in IoT application domains such as smart cities, smart farming and smart agriculture, agri-food sector, integrated energy systems, construction Industry, electric vehicle and autonomous vehicles, structural integrity, supply Chain, smart production and logistics
Submission and Publication Guidelines
The Midd4DT 2023 workshop proceedings will be indexed and published in the ACM Digital Library. The official publication date will be when the proceedings are made available in the ACM Digital Library. Submitted papers must adhere to the formatting instructions of the ACM SIGPLAN style, which can be found on the ACM template page.
Authors are invited to submit original, unpublished research papers. Papers must be written in English and strictly following ACM SIGPLAN style. The font size has to be set to 10pt.
Please use the HOTCRP link for paper submissions: https://midd4dt23.hotcrp.com/

Three types of submissions are accepted:
Regular Research papers: contributions should describe original work (6 up to 9 pages including all text, figures, references, and appendices).
Short Papers and position papers: ​Research in progress, tools presentations, and new ideas ​(4 up to 6 pages including all text, figures, references, and appendices).

Submitted papers will be evaluated according to their rigor, significance, originality, technical quality and exposition, by at least three distinct members of an international program committee.
At least one author of each accepted paper must register and participate in the workshop. Registration is subject to the terms, conditions, and procedures of the main conference: https://middleware-conf.github.io/2023/
Important Dates (Tentative)
Submission deadline: September 30th, 2023
Decision notification: October 30th, 2023
Camera-ready deadline: November 20th, 2023
Workshop date: December 12th, 2023

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS (Tentative)
Professor Yan Zhang
Department of Informatics
Simula Metropolitan Center for Digital Engineering,
University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

PROGRAM COMMITTEE
Dr. AKRAM HAKIRI, University of Carthage, Tunisia, email: akram.hakiri@issatm.rnu.tn
Akram Hakiri is an Associate Professor of Computer Sciences and Engineering at the University of Carthage, and a research scientist at SYSCOM Labs’ ENIT, both in Tunisia. He was a senior research scientist and researcher at LAAS-CNRS, Toulouse, France, and a visiting research scientist at the Institute for Software Integrated Systems (ISIS) at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA. Dr.

Prof. Dr. Aniruddha S Gokhale, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA,
email: a.gokhale@vanderbilt.edu
Full Professor of Computer Science and Engineering. Faculty member at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA since 2003. His research interests include Cloud/Edge computing, Distributed Systems, Middleware Design, and Model-driven Engineering.