Industrial world today is experiencing its fourth industrial revolution. Predecessor of the automation industry, Industry-4.0 adds a layer of autonomy, intelligence and advanced connectivity to complex industrial systems. This layer creates an interactive and dynamic bridge between virtual systems and physical systems with their upward constraints and requirements in a constantly changing physical environment. Digital twins fall into the category of advanced concepts and technologies that enhance this connectivity. Several projects have been launched in Morocco by the government, industrialists and research communities, initiating the digital transformation of Moroccan industrial manufactories and companies. This paper comes within this framework, firstly to highlight the great potential that digital twins can offer for Moroccan industrial context enhancement, secondly to identify the challenges that can hinder the integration and development of digital twins in Moroccan industrial environment.

Thermal power plants, TPP, are one of the main players in the phosphoric acid and fertilizer production value chain. The control of power plant assets involves considerable complexity and is subject to several constraints, affecting the asset’s reliability and, most importantly, plant operators’ safety. The main focus of this paper is to investigate the potential of an agent-based digital twin architecture for collaborative prognostic of power plants. Based on the ISO 13374:2015 scheme for smart condition monitoring, the proposed architecture consists of a collaborative prognostics system governed by several smart DT agents connected to both physical and virtual environments. In order to apprehend the potential of the developed agent-based architecture, experiments on the architecture are conducted in a real industrial environment. We show throughout the paper that our proposed architecture is robust and reproduces TPP static and dynamic behavior and can contribute to the smart monitoring of the plant in case of critical conditions.

The agents used in the intrusion detection architectures have multiple characteristics namely delegation, cooperation and communication. However, an important property of agents: learning is not used. The concept of learning in existing IDSs used in general to learn the normal behavior of the system to secure. For this, normal profiles are built in a dedicated training phase, these profiles are then compared with the current activity. Thus, the IDS does not have the ability to detect new attacks. We propose in this paper, a new architecture based intrusion MAS adding a learning feature abnormal behaviors that correspond to new attack patterns detection. Thanks to this feature to update the knowledge base of attacks take place when a new plan of attack is discovered. To learn a new attack, the architecture must detect at first and then update the basic attack patterns. For the detection step, the detection approach adopted is based on the technique of Case-Based Reasoning (CBR). Thus, the proposed architecture is based on a hierarchical and distributed strategy where features are structured and separated into layers.