What is a Digital Twin?
Abstract
Over the last two decades, a concept called Digital Twin has evolved rapidly. Yet, there is no unified definition of the term. Based on a literature study and an industrial case study, an overarching definition of Digital twins is presented. Three characteristics were identified – representation of a physical system, bidirectional data exchange, and the connection along the entire lifecycle. Further, three sub-concepts are presented, namely: Engineering Twin, Production Twin, and Operation Twin. The presented paper thus formulates a consistent and detailed definition of Digital Twins.
Introduction
In the last decade, companies of all sizes, all around the globe are facing ever more fast-paced, uncertain, and complex boundary conditions. A driver of this phenomenon is the growing digitization forcing companies to develop more cost- and time-efficiently. On the other hand, digital or virtual engineering also enables companies to cope with these challenges (Hanschke, 2018). In the course of this trend, a theory called Digital Twin has developed over the last two decades. The term describes the virtual representation of a physical system. In the beginning, Digital Twins were merely descriptive, but as computational and information and communication technologies evolved, it became possible to establish a bidirectional coupling between the digital and the physical system (Grieves and Vickers, 2017). Since its basic idea in 2002, the relevance of Digital Twins has grown increasingly. In a workshop with 40 Swedish industrial and academic experts, Eckert et al. (2019) identified “complete integrated twins” as one of the major industry trends to 2040. The expected benefits are manifold. According to Jones et al. (2019), the benefits of “twinning” concepts lie in an increased accuracy and fidelity as well as decreased time/costs and workload in the process of creating real-time virtual representation or in the process of realizing virtual descriptions in the physical system. However, according to Tao et al. (2019) to date, Digital Twins were primarily applied in production or after-production stages, rarely in earlier stages such as product design. Despite a large number of occurrences in literature, there is still no consistent, overarching definition of Digital Twins.
The results presented in this contribution were elaborated in an industrial case study with the intention of developing a comprehensive approach supporting companies in the conception and implementation of Digital Twins. The corresponding case study is described in the paper of Schweigert-Recksiek et al. (2020).
by Jakob TrauerSebastian, Schweigert-Recksiek, C. Egel, K. Spreitzer
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