Industrial Metaverse: Enabling Technologies, Open Problems, and Future Trends

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive survey of the enabling technologies, challenges, and future trends of the Industrial Metaverse, highlighting its potential to revolutionize industrial production through integration of XR, blockchain, digital twins, 6G, and AI.

Contribution

It offers an in-depth analysis of key enabling technologies and discusses open problems and future research directions in the emerging field of the Industrial Metaverse.

Findings

Identified blockchain, digital twin, 6G, XR, and AI as key enabling technologies.

Highlighted security, resource, and interoperability challenges.

Outlined potential solutions and future research directions.

Abstract

As an emerging technology that enables seamless integration between the physical and virtual worlds, the Metaverse has great potential to be deployed in the industrial production field with the development of extended reality (XR) and next-generation communication networks. This deployment, called the Industrial Metaverse, is used for product design, production operations, industrial quality inspection, and product testing. However, there lacks of in-depth understanding of the enabling technologies associated with the Industrial Metaverse. This encompasses both the precise industrial scenarios targeted by each technology and the potential migration of technologies developed in other domains to the industrial sector. Driven by this issue, in this article, we conduct a comprehensive survey of the state-of-the-art literature on the Industrial Metaverse. Specifically, we first analyze the advantages of the Metaverse for industrial production. Then, we review a collection of key enabling technologies of the Industrial Metaverse, including blockchain (BC), digital twin (DT), 6G, XR, and artificial intelligence (AI), and analyze how these technologies can support different aspects of industrial production. Subsequently, we present numerous formidable challenges encountered within the Industrial Metaverse, including confidentiality and security concerns, resource limitations, and interoperability constraints. Furthermore, we investigate the extant solutions devised to address them. Finally, we briefly outline several open issues and future research directions of the Industrial Metaverse.