Digital shadow as a tool for industry exploring

Abstract

Digitalisation contributes both to fundamental changes in production processes and to the web of relationships between business units. According to contemporary views, it will result in the common widespread using of the real objects’ digital models (digital twins). Their quality will define the competitiveness of a certain economic pattern. Thus, all the digital twin data automatically becomes a trade secret. In this context, external investigators are able to analyse only visible representation of digital twins – digital footprints, imprints and shadows. The aim of the article is to formalise the “digital shadow” notion and to investigate the perspectives of its implementation in economic sectoral analysis. The subject of the research is freight transport. The article claims that the digital twin includes three components: physical transportation (first-type information), coordination of economic interests (second-type information) and long-term management of consignors and consignees technologies (third-type information). Therefore, the digital shadow is the inversion of the digital twin for each component. The author proposes the digital twin model and the corresponding digital shadow. This model is applied to road, railway and pipeline transport modes in Russia. The digital shadow, in turn, is given in the lowest possible resolution – in the binary assessment of the each information type components. The researcher assumes that the resulting digital shadow allows to conduct a generalised analysis and also forms the basis for identifying cause-effect relationships and forecasting.