The concept of the Digital Twin continues to receive a mixed reception when it is raised in conversation. There are a multitude of factors that have given rise to this ‘love-hate’ relationship, ranging from conceptual stretching to mis-selling, to conflation and a certain amount of dissonance between vendors, users and consultants. Underlying all these factors is a common theme, a fundamental lack of understanding!
To address this lack of understanding and to refresh the understanding of those who believe they are well versed in all things digital and twinning, we have decided to compile a repository of our work on Digital Twins from the last 8 or so years. The series covers the fundamentals (basics) and the journey from the definitions of what is and what is not a Digital Twin to technical approaches for cost modelling of a Digital Twin project and methods for appraising and quantifying the benefits.
This first blog set the scene for the series while the second covered the ‘definitions dilemma’. Our third blog summarises an academic paper we wrote back in 2020 entitled “Characterising the Digital Twin: A systematic literature review“. The paper has since been cited almost 3,000 times and downloaded more than 10,000 times. The paper makes two important contributions. First, it develops the 13 attributes of a Digital Twin including:
Second, the paper establishes seven barriers or challenges facing Digital Twins. These include:
- Benefit horizon: Demonstration of anticipated benefits within medium term horizons (3-5 yrs).
- Lifecycle integration: understanding the relationship between Digital Twins and the Product Lifecycle including their mutuality/dependency.
- Reference cases: establishing industry or sector reference cases including cost-benefit (value).
- Technical standards: establishing standards and best practice for technical Implementations.
- Fidelity level: understanding fidelity and determining the required level of fidelity for a particular application and purpose.
- Data governance: governance for data ownership, sharing and IP.
- Virtual integration: standards and approaches for integration of the virtual entities that constitute a twin.
Several of these challenges are being addressed by international standard committees while others have been the subject of government research programmes. Influenced by our experiences and industrial networks, we have focussed on the second challenge and Digital Threads; the third challenge – that of evaluating cost-benefit; the fourth challenge via contributions to technical committees; and, the fifth challenge of fidelity. Consequently, our forthcoming blogs will focus on each of these topics.
Please do get in contact with the team if you would like to know more and/or work with us.
Watch out for our fourth blog that will cover our work with standards committees.
