Microservices’ libraries enabling server-side business logic visual programming for digital twins

Digital twins are evermore adopted for planning activities in smart city and industrial contexts, thus requiring platforms able to handle their complexity, continuously adapting and improving data flow business logic behind to the user needs. To respond to such needs microservice architecture paradigm and business logic scripting solutions can be exploited. They should include facilities for data ingestion, transformation, visualization & event-driven user interaction, formal definition of functional aspects, exploitation and management of data analytics and simulation, interoperability with external services of any kind, etc. To provide an easy and quick development tools, a large number of microservices have been formalized in a suite of new Nodes for the Node-RED framework and distributed in terms of Libraries via JS Foundation. The proposed suites of nodes (e.g., Snap4City libraries on Node-RED) are widely adopted by academic and industrial groups and fully integrated into Snap4City, an open-source platform for digital twins realization which can be used on cloud and on-premise.