Congratulations! You've Got Twins!

There are two things in life for which we are never truly prepared: twins. – Josh Billings

As an online researcher, I am always grateful to find a review article that explains a buzz phrase like Digital Twin. That’s why I like the article profiled below. It describes the digital twin concept as well any other source I have seen. BONUS … you can read the full text of the article at no charge.

TIP: Read on.

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CIRP Journal of Manufacturing Science and Technology
Available online 9 March 2020
In Press, Corrected Proof
Characterising the Digital Twin: A systematic literature review
David Jones, Chris Snider, Aydin Nassehi, Jason Yon, Ben Hicks
Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Bristol, United Kingdom
Under a Creative Commons license
Abstract
While there has been a recent growth of interest in the Digital Twin, a variety of definitions employed across industry and academia remain. There is a need to consolidate research such to maintain a common understanding of the topic and ensure future research efforts are to be based on solid foundations. Through a systematic literature review and a thematic analysis of 92 Digital Twin publications from the last ten years, this paper provides a characterisation of the Digital Twin, identification of gaps in knowledge, and required areas of future research. In characterising the Digital Twin, the state of the concept, key terminology, and associated processes are identified, discussed, and consolidated to produce 13 characteristics (Physical Entity/Twin; Virtual Entity/Twin; Physical Environment; Virtual Environment; State; Realisation; Metrology; Twinning; Twinning Rate; Physical-to-Virtual Connection/Twinning; Virtual-to-Physical Connection/Twinning; Physical Processes; and Virtual Processes) and a complete framework of the Digital Twin and its process of operation. Following this characterisation, seven knowledge gaps and topics for future research focus are identified: Perceived Benefits; Digital Twin across the Product Life-Cycle; Use-Cases; Technical Implementations; Levels of Fidelity; Data Ownership; and Integration between Virtual Entities; each of which are required to realise the Digital Twin.
Keywords: Digital Twin, Virtual Twin
Introduction
Typically described as consisting of a physical entity, a virtual counterpart, and the data connections in between, the Digital Twin is increasingly being explored as a means of improving the performance of physical entities through leveraging computational techniques, themselves enabled through the virtual counterpart. Interest in the Digital Twin has greatly increased in the past five years across both academia and industry, accompanied by a growth in the number of related publications, processes, concepts, and envisaged benefits (see Fig. 1). Missing from literature, however, is a consolidated and consistent view on what the Digital Twin is, and how the concept is evolving to meet the needs of the many use-cases to which it is being tied. This lack of consistency has led to a breadth of characterisations and definitions for digital twins and the digital twinning process that, due to the breadth of frameworks applied across industry, leads to a risk of diluting the concept and missing the benefits that the Digital Twin was originally devised to deliver.
The origin of the Digital Twin
The origin of the Digital Twin is attributed to Michael Grieves and his work with John Vickers of NASA, with Grieves presenting the concept in a lecture on product life-cycle management in 2003 [33]. In a time when Grieves describes virtual product representations as “…relatively new and immature” and data collected about physical products as “…limited, manually collected, and mostly paper-based”, Grieves and Vickers saw a world where a virtual model of a product would provide the foundations for product life-cycle management.
The initial description defines a Digital Twin as a virtual representation of a physical product containing information about said product, with its origins in the field of product life-cycle management. In an early paper [33] Grieves expands on this definition by describing the Digital Twin as consisting of three components, a physical product, a virtual representation of that product, and the bi-directional data connections that feed data from the physical to the virtual representation, and information and processes from the virtual representation to the physical. Grieves depicted this flow as a cycle between the physical and virtual states (mirroring or twinning); of data from the physical to the virtual, and of information and processes from the virtual to the physical (see Fig. 2). The virtual spaces themselves consisting of any number of sub-spaces that enable specific virtual operations: modelling, testing, optimisation, etc.
Free full text source: https://www.cdbb.cam.ac.uk/Resources/ResoucePublications/BISBIMstrategyReport.pdf
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Jean Steinhardt served as Librarian, Aramco Services, Engineering Division, for 13 years. He now heads Jean Steinhardt Consulting LLC, producing the same high quality research that he performed for Aramco.

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