In the Confirm research centre on Smart Manufacturing as well as in Industry 4.0 in general, a Digital Thread connects the data and processes for smarter products, smarter production, and smarter integrated ecosystems. While the tangible goods (products and production lines) are understood as needing a Digital Twin as an executable model, i.e. an in-silico entity on which to virtually explore design, production, quality, and lifetime maintenance, the immaterial goods like software are not yet treated on par.

We argue that the increasingly ambitious needs of the people, the economic sectors, and the large-scale trends can only be met if the IT professions embrace and adopt a new way of producing and consuming IT. The new way to deal with software will be more mature in the sense of automation of production and management, based on more formal descriptions, more models, more reasoning and analysis before expensive implementations are incurred. Behavioural models are accordingly the natural Digital Twins of the software.

For this new paradigm to enter mainstream, models need to be coupled with automatic transformations, generations, and analyses that take advantage of the formalized knowledge about the immaterial and material entities. This formalized knowledge includes a variety of models together wit Domain Specific Languages that use semantic types at their core.

We provide a few examples of how the new thinking can disrupt the status quo but empower a better understanding, a more efficient organization, and a more automatic management of the many cross-dimensional issues that future connected software and systems will depend upon.

Tiziana Margaria is Chair of Software Systems and Head of Department at the Dept. of Computer Science and Information Systems at the University of Limerick. She also heads the Lero Committee on International Relations Development. She has broad experience in the use of formal methods for high assurance systems, in particular concerning functional verification, reliability, and compliance of complex heterogeneous systems. She is currently Vice President of the European Association of Software Science and Technology (EASST); President of FMICS (the ERCIM Working Group on Formal Methods for Industrial Critical Systems); steering committee member of ETAPS, the European joint Conferences on Theory and Practice of Software; managing editor of STTT, the Springer Journal on Software Tools for Technology Transfer; and co-founder of the TACAS and ISoLA series of conferences. Tiziana is a Fellow of the Irish Computer Society and of SDPS, the Society for Design and Process Science. In EuSEM (European Society for Emergency Medicine), she co-chairs the Special Interest Group on Technology and Processes of Care in the Emergency Care (SIG-TPCEC). In Education, she has co-chaired IEEE COMPSAC CELT (Symposium on Computer Education Teaching and Learning) in 2017 and 2018, a founder of FM-SEET (on Formal Methods Education) and is a promoter of OER, Open Education Resouces.

In Lero, she heads research projects on model-driven service-oriented Software design for evolving systems, on Scientific Workflows, in particular for data analytics, and on holistic HW/SW Cybersecurity.

Contact her at tiziana.margaria@ul.ie (https://www.lero.ie/people/tiziana-margaria)