Digital Twins in Engineering Education, Preparing Students for Industrial Digital Transformation

Digital twins, one of the new important technologies which started to be omnipresent in literature since Industry 4.0 got started, are becoming an essential part of the digital transformation processes in industry. Simply put, a digital twin is a virtual model designed to accurately reflect a physical object and is connected to the real asset with a bi-directional digital thread. Despite the different soft- and hardware architectures and applied fields digital twins are aimed to unify general architectural solutions, speed up design processes and provide reliable tools to provide safe, reliable and secure solutions for running physical systems. At the same time it is can be used as an educational tool, a framework to connect different technologies and it could be a bridge between Industry and Academia.