Digital Twin Simulation Platforms for Large-Scale Operational Systems
Keywords:
Digital Twin, Event-Driven Architecture, Operational Systems, Reproducibility, Scenario Planning, Simulation PlatformAbstract
Large-scale operational systems in e-commerce, logistics, and fulfillment increasingly depend on simulation platforms to evaluate consequential decisions before committing to production change. Digital twin (DT) simulation has emerged as the foundational technique for this purpose, enabling what-if analysis, scenario planning, stress testing, and policy evaluation in a controlled, reproducible environment. However, at the operational scale, credible simulation is not primarily a modeling challenge; it is a platform engineering challenge. This article argues that DTs become decision infrastructure only when designed as platforms: reproducible across system versions, capable of high-throughput event replay, isolated from production workloads, and governed for multi-tenant access. Drawing on peer-reviewed literature spanning DT architectures, stream processing systems, logistics simulation, and manufacturing reference models, this article presents a reproducibility contract framework, a seven-layer reference architecture, and a structured catalogue of failure modes with organizational mitigations. The central contribution is a platform-engineering perspective that reframes DT simulation from a modeling exercise into a governed, scalable infrastructure discipline.
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