Digital Twin in complex operations environments: potential applications and research challenges

This paper aims to thoroughly discuss the use of Digital Twin technology in complex operations environments, highlighting its potential applications and the research challenges that need to be addressed. This is necessitated by the fact that currently there is no comprehensive literature review and framework for implementing Digital Twin technology in complex operations environments. Furthermore, existing interpretations of DT implementation are inadequately detailed and not very informative in this area. This may be a consequence of the difficulties of collecting and extracting useful information from data in real-time. Another drawback worth mentioning is that Digital twins at the moment center on an individual or isolated part instead of integrating the whole system and no current work talks about this holistic approach. This paper will focus on Digital Twins in complex operations environments and their applications. A review of scientific literature on the use of Digital Twins in complex operations environments is performed and the articles are categorized by the problems and challenges that they address requiring DT as a solution. A selection of papers that focus on this topic and represent the current situation of research will be emphasized. In conclusion, this work will be utilized as a baseline study to propose a Digital Twin reference framework, which eventually leads to implementing and evaluating a comprehensive Digital Twin methodology in complex systems.