Current Trends in Digital Twin Development, Maintenance, and Operation: An Interview Study

TL;DR

This interview-based study investigates how practitioners from industry and academia define, design, and maintain digital twins (DTs) across complex industrial systems. It reveals a lack of uniform definitions and inconsistent understanding of the DT components, particularly regarding the 5D DT model, VE fidelity, and cross-domain communication. The findings highlight substantial reuse, integration, orchestration, and validation challenges, along with opportunities to bring more software-engineering practices into DT lifecycles. The work suggests concrete avenues for tool development, standards, and methodologies to improve cross-domain model consistency, DT orchestration, and dynamic validation in practice.

Abstract

Digital twins (DT) are often defined as a pairing of a physical entity and a corresponding virtual entity (VE), mimicking certain aspects of the former depending on the use-case. In recent years, this concept has facilitated numerous use-cases ranging from design to validation and predictive maintenance of large and small high-tech systems. Various heterogeneous cross-domain models are essential for such systems and model-driven engineering plays a pivotal role in the design, development, and maintenance of these models. We believe models and model-driven engineering play a similarly crucial role in the context of a VE of a DT. Due to the rapidly growing popularity of DTs and their use in diverse domains and use-cases, the methodologies, tools, and practices for designing, developing, and maintaining the corresponding VEs differ vastly. To better understand these differences and similarities, we performed a semi-structured interview research with 19 professionals from industry and academia who are closely associated with different lifecycle stages of digital twins. In this paper, we present our analysis and findings from this study, which is based on seven research questions. In general, we identified an overall lack of uniformity in terms of the understanding of digital twins and used tools, techniques, and methodologies for the development and maintenance of the corresponding VEs. Furthermore, considering that digital twins are software intensive systems, we recognize a significant growth potential for adopting more software engineering practices, processes, and expertise in various stages of a digital twin's lifecycle.

Figures (7)

• Figure 1: Depiction of the concept of digital twin as introduced by Grieves grieves2017digital where he conceptualized a virtual space or virtual entity (VE) and synchronisation with its physical counterpart. Our research focuses on the VE.
• Figure 2: Five dimensional (5D) model of a DT proposed by Tao et al. tao2017digital
• Figure 3: An overview of our major research activities.
• Figure 4: Relationship among various research activities and related outcomes.
• Figure 5: The correlation among the identified domains (y-axis) of the interviewees and DT's application (x-axis). The numbers on the plot represent the number of DT's applications in that specific domain.