Digital Twins in the Internet of Things Context

Digital Twin is a term currently popular among researchers in the context of digitalization, Cyber-Physical Systems and Industry 4.0. Therefore, this paper gives a brief history of the Digital Twin concept and presents its main components as they have been introduced by two well known architectures. Different applications of Digital Twins in manufacturing, healthcare, smart cities, and agriculture are shown. Their analysis emphasized that the implementation of the Digital Twin concept is still in its infancy and several key challenges must be considered. Among those, communications, big data analysis, and security have received the most attention from the research community and industry. Two different architectures, that use two different communication protocols to transmit the acquired data describing the physical system to be replicated in the digital world are given as use-case systems. These identify the Internet of Things vision as a key enabler of Digital Twin implementations.

I. Introduction

In the last decades, following the vision of the Industry 4.0 paradigm, the industry processes have evolved to include smart objects based on the concept of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs), that represent complex integrations of digital, analog, physical, and human components [1]. Cyber-Physical Systems are capable to replicate the real processes (physical world) in a digital environment (cyber world) in real-time based on the analysis of data collected from various devices [2]. The replication of the physical model (i.e., for simulation, prediction, self-monitoring, controlling, self-diagnosis) in the cyber world is achieved through various digital models that compose a Digital Twin (DT). Therefore, the DT concept is related to CPSs and it can be seen as their digital counterpart [2].