Digital twins services architectural design: practical implementation

Document Type

Book Chapter

Source of Publication

Digital Twin Handbook Challenges Opportunities and Future Research Directions

Publication Date

11-17-2025

Abstract

The rapid growth of digitisation of business workflows using Industry 4.0 (4IR) has transformed the way businesses interact with products, processes and people. As an emerging technology, the digital twin can establish two-way communication to simu late attributes and behaviours between physical and virtual entities. The ability to synchronise the state in real-time, model using ontologies, combined with other 4IR technologies such as the Internet of Things, cloud computing, big data and artificial intelligence, has enabled these digital models for self-generation, self-optimisation and self-configuration based on the physical state. Much research followed this data-driven approach of simulating physical entities with 4IR technologies to solve fundamental problems such as intelligent automation, revolutionise industries, value addition, reduce power consumption and climate change using historical and real-time multi model data. Based on the existing literature, the study has identified the key aspects of a digital twin service such as components, data, models, technologies, architectures and challenges to overcome to ensure the digital twin service achieves the organisational requirements. Researchers used open-source, commercial or custom digital twin plat forms to overcome the challenges associated with the digital twin process. These platforms are categorised according to the code availability for core services, acceptable use and licencing by the vendors. Despite having many advantages, as an emerging technology majority of these technologies are not mature or not widely used by the industry and pose many limitations. It is required to follow decision-making mechanisms to select the right digital twin platforms. Furthermore, this chapter is categorised into two parts as the digital twin service and digital twin platforms, and multiple subsections will briefly discuss to lay the foundation of the practical digital twinning process to build either commercial or academic proof of concepts.

ISBN

[9781839538988, 9781839538995]

Publisher

The Institution of Engineering and Technology

First Page

237

Last Page

272

Disciplines

Computer Sciences

Keywords

digital twin architectures, digital twin challenges, digital twin platforms, Digital twinning process, modelling and simulation, vendor selection process

Scopus ID

105027364714

Indexed in Scopus

yes

Open Access

no

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