Digital Twins of Business Processes: A Research Manifesto

TL;DR

This paper discusses the emerging role of Digital Twins in business processes, highlighting their potential to enhance organizational efficiency through real-time data integration and simulation, while also addressing current challenges and future research directions.

Contribution

It clarifies the relationship between Digital Twins and business processes, identifies research gaps, and outlines open challenges to guide future work in this field.

Findings

Digital Twins enable real-time monitoring and simulation of business processes.

Integration challenges include data management and system complexity.

The paper highlights open research questions and future directions.

Abstract

Modern organizations necessitate continuous business processes improvement to maintain efficiency, adaptability, and competitiveness. In the last few years, the Internet of Things, via the deployment of sensors and actuators, has heavily been adopted in organizational and industrial settings to monitor and automatize physical processes influencing and enhancing how people and organizations work. Such advancements are now pushed forward by the rise of the Digital Twin paradigm applied to organizational processes. Advanced ways of managing and maintaining business processes come within reach as there is a Digital Twin of a business process - a virtual replica with real-time capabilities of a real process occurring in an organization. Combining business process models with real-time data and simulation capabilities promises to provide a new way to guide day-to-day organization activities. However, integrating Digital Twins and business processes is a non-trivial task, presenting numerous challenges and ambiguities. This manifesto paper aims to contribute to the current state of the art by clarifying the relationship between business processes and Digital Twins, identifying ongoing research and open challenges, thereby shedding light on and driving future exploration of this innovative interplay.