Digital Twin Platforms: Architectures and Functions

In the Industry 4.0 era, many emerging technologies are being embraced by manufacturers, including Digital Twin (DT) technology. DT has been known as a critical enabler for smart manufacturing and has attracted much attention from academia and industry. Meanwhile, the demand for DT platforms is growing as they enable more effective and easy development and deployment for DTs. DT expands to different industrial scenarios, which has led to an increasing variety of DT platforms. However, there are many different understandings and concepts of DT from diverse backgrounds, so it is essential to acquire a good understanding of DT platforms. This paper aims to provide a literature review of DT platforms in manufacturing. Firstly, the current state of DT technology is presented, and a generalized definition of the DT platform is proposed. A comprehensive search for literature related to the DT platform was conducted using the Web of Science database through the definition. Meanwhile, the importance of ISO 23247, an international standard on DT frameworks for manufacturing, has been discussed to give a general view of requirements for building a DT platform. After that, typical DT platforms in both academia and industry were analyzed separately. Finally, a discussion is carried out to summarise the architecture, features, and functions that are important for DT platform development.