Abstract
Currently, Digital Twins receive considerable attention from practitioners and in research. A Digital Twin describes a concept that connects physical and virtual objects through a data linkage. However, Digital Twins are highly dependent on their individual use case, which leads to a plethora of Digital Twin configurations. Based on a thorough literature analysis and two interview series with experts from various electrical and mechanical engineering companies, this paper proposes a set of archetypes of Digital Twins for individual use cases. It delimits the Digital Twins from related concepts, e.g., Digital Threads. The paper delivers profound insights into the domain of Digital Twins and, thus, helps the reader to identify the different archetypical patterns.
Highlights
Digital Twins are gaining much attention in research and with practitioners (Detecon Consulting 2019; PwC 2020), which becomes apparent in a steep rise in academicAccepted after one revision by Oscar Pastor.H
Digital Twins are highly dependent on their individual use case, which leads to a plethora of Digital Twin configurations
Based on a thorough literature analysis and two interview series with experts from various electrical and mechanical engineering companies, this paper proposes a set of archetypes of Digital Twins for individual use cases
Summary
Digital Twins are gaining much attention in research and with practitioners (Detecon Consulting 2019; PwC 2020), which becomes apparent in a steep rise in academic. The significant advantage of that approach is that we can differentiate Digital Twins based on morphological characteristics and representative patterns which we can use to distinguish archetypes. The understanding and definition of Digital Twins varied across the study’s participants according to their industrial sector Those findings further added to our motivation to harmonize the understanding of Digital Twins and standardize it to some degree. Given the usefulness of the archetypical differentiation of Digital Twins, as per the argumentation given above, we derive the following research questions (RQ): RQ1 What clusters of Digital Twins can be derived from the literature corpus?. The paper is structured as follows: After a brief overview of the definitions of Digital Twins, their usages, and origins, we will describe our research methods, i.e., the structured literature review, the development of a taxonomy, the qualitative research approaches, and the method of deriving archetypical patterns. The archetypes are discussed and evaluated before we provide the conclusion, limitations, and a brief outlook on future research
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