An Agent-Based Architecture of the Digital Twin for an Emergency Department

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The article is devoted to a rather important issue, since methods and technologies for the use of digital twins are currently being actively developed.

At the same time, the authors indicate that the basis of their work is the definitions used in the source [5]. However, it is advisable to expand the rationale for using this particular approach.

In general, according to the article: it is necessary to avoid the use of pronouns (for example, line 103, 206, etc.), and use the word - authors, author's work, etc.

In addition, it is necessary to revise the list of sources, since developments in the presented area have advanced significantly in recent years, it is advisable to use articles published over the past 5 years.

Author Response

We would like tho thank the reviewer for his/her work and comments to this work. Most modifications we performed are highlighted in blue on the paper .

The article is devoted to a rather important issue, since methods and technologies for the use of digital twins are currently being actively developed.
At the same time, the authors indicate that the basis of their work is the definitions used in the source [5]. However, it is advisable to expand the rationale for using this particular approach.

• We provide more details in section 2 to justify our choice to follow Kritzinger's taxonomy.

In general, according to the article: it is necessary to avoid the use of pronouns (for example, line 103, 206, etc.), and use the word - authors, author's work, etc.

• The paper has been modified accordingly.

In addition, it is necessary to revise the list of sources, since developments in the presented area have advanced significantly in recent years, it is advisable to use articles published over the past 5 years.

• Some recent references have been added, e.g. 34 and 35. Currently, on 39 references, 27 are from 2018 and after, 5 are from 2016 or 2017 and 7 are from before 2017.

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear Authors,

Congratulations on the manuscript and your work.  I look forward to seeing the work in the future.

Sincerely,

Author Response

We would like to thank the reviewer for his/her review and his/her support on our work.

Reviewer 3 Report

This paper intends to propose an architecture of Digital Twin that relies on agent-based simulation, with an application on emergency departments.

The state of the art is focused on healthcare systems, whereas an extensive analysis of the existing implementation architectures of Digital Twin would have been interesting.

The core of the proposal is in section 3, and especially 3.1. What is suggested here is interesting, but lacks genericity. A clear positioning of transitions and modes in a generic DT model would have been interesting for the reader. In this form, the description of 3.1 is only applicable in the case study of the authors.

Section 3.2 is again too close to the case study, and a generic view of the process would be appreciated.

With respect to what was written before, section 4 is therefore too short, and could gain from a revision of the outline. The discussion could also gain from an extension of the case study and the instanciation of the generic architecture.

Author Response

We would like tho thank the reviewer for his/her work and comments to this work. Most modifications we performed are highlighted in blue on the paper.

This paper intends to propose an architecture of Digital Twin that relies on agent-based simulation, with an application on emergency departments.
The state of the art is focused on healthcare systems, whereas an extensive analysis of the existing implementation architectures of Digital Twin would have been interesting.

• A subsection dedicated to DT architecture review has been added in the literature section.

The core of the proposal is in section 3, and especially 3.1. What is suggested here is interesting, but lacks genericity. A clear positioning of transitions and modes in a generic DT model would have been interesting for the reader. In this form, the description of 3.1 is only applicable in the case study of the authors.
Section 3.2 is again too close to the case study, and a generic view of the process would be appreciated.
With respect to what was written before, Section 4 is therefore too short, and could gain from a revision of the outline. The discussion could also gain from an extension of the case study and the instanciation of the generic architecture.

• The paper has been restructured to make explicit the generic definition of the architecture in section 3 and the implementation details have been moved into Section 4.

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

Thank you for the modifications, which solve the issues of previous version