Digital Twin Development: A Step by Step Guideline

Abstract

Digital Twin (DT) is a virtual representation, which integrates sensor data, physical models, historical data, and etc. to emulate the life of its physical counterpart. Although, existing studies have shown many use cases in health monitoring, decision-making support, and life-cycle management, the development of the DT remains complex. Meanwhile, there is a limited number of studies that investigate a generic and detailed method to develop the DT. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to present a step by step guideline that allows a developer to identify and to populate the requirements for developing the DT as well as to corroborate that the DT fulfil its missions. A case study of a modified mobile asset illustrated how the guideline was applied and how the DT purpose was validated through an empirical test. Further studies will investigate the attributes of the scalability and the flexibility of the proposed framework to pave a way for a common approach for the DT development and evaluation.