Cross-Domain Comparative Analysis of Digital Twins and Universalised Solutions

TL;DR

This paper compares digital twins across five domains using a six-dimensional framework and proposes a universal Digital Twin Platform-as-a-Service to enhance cross-domain sharing, interoperability, and address global challenges.

Contribution

It introduces a cross-domain analysis framework and a universal DT-PaaS platform to unify digital twin development and facilitate global collaboration.

Findings

Digital twins vary across domains but share core principles.

The proposed DT-PaaS enables cross-domain data sharing and interoperability.

Universal principles can guide digital twin development globally.

Abstract

Digitalisation is one of the main drivers of most economic sectors nowadays and the digital twin, as a reification of digitalisation for complex systems has attracted much attention from both academics and industry. There have been studies focusing on digital twins in a specific sector while there are few exercising insightful comparisons of digital twins from different domains. Considering the digital twinning is a cross-domain transformation, it is beneficial to establish the principles of universality and variation that can explain similarities and differences in any digital twins. This paper first delivers a comparative analysis of digital twins in five domains through a six-dimensional characterisation framework. Then, by departing from the correlations among the domain-specific DT development, a cross-domain Digital Twin Platform-as-a-Service (DT-PaaS) is proposed to universalise the common process, tools and applications, meanwhile being inclusive of variations of every digital twin instance. As a centralised data, modeling and service platform, it is expected to break the barriers between domains by enabling the cross-domain digital twin data sharing, interoperability and development synergy and tackle some complex global challenges such as climate challenge, net zero, pandemics, etc.