A Vision for Advancing Digital Twins Intelligence: Key Insights and Lessons from Decades of Research and Experience with Simulation

Digital Twins have revolutionized the domain of Modeling and Simulation by making use of the growing and cost-efficient possibilities to extract data from systems, as well as the increasing computational power. At the same time, Digital Twins have enabled tremendous advances in diverse cyber-physical systems by enabling better monitoring, predictive maintenance, design optimization, and informed decision-making. As their popularity evolved, the understanding of what a Digital Twins has become more and more dispersed and unclear. Here, we offer understanding of what a Digital Twin is based on our experience in research within its native domain of Modeling and Simulation, with a concrete focus on the key considerations that need to be made when developing Digital Twins or working with them. We, furthermore, emphasize the need to include all available knowledge for better-informed Digital Twins. To illustrate our ideas and vision, we use case studies from our research.