Oil and Gas digital twins after twenty years. How can they be made sustainable, maintainable and useful?

The digital twin offers a potentially powerful way of using simulation to support business and change the way industrial operations are done. The idea of the digital twin is not new but recent changes in information technology make implementation of digital twins a natural next step in the application of simulation technologies. Simulation practitioners will find that their models are increasingly embedded in complex systems that combine simulations with operational data to solve a business problem. However, the successful adoption of this approach is challenging. This paper asks the question: “How can digital twins be made sustainable, maintainable and useful?”. We focus primarily on the development of twins in the oil and gas industry. Most academic work in this area has been done in the manufacturing industries. We review this literature and propose a simple model of digital twins. This allows us to identify challenges with current implementations and propose a research agenda that will allow future twins to be sustainable, maintainable and usable.