Awesome Digital Twins

This is a curated repository of awesome Digital Twin resources.

Research and industry leverage digital twins to monitor and/or control (cyber-physical) systems in various domains, including automotive, avionics, biology, construction, manufacturing, medicine, and many more. They promise a tremendous potential to reduce cost and time and improve our understanding of the represented systems. The various digital twins serve different purposes, including analysis, control, and behavior prediction, and they are used at different times relative to the represented system, e.g., before it exists to explore its design space or during its runtime to optimize its behavior.

Contents

• Definitions
• Software Solutions
• Videos
• Books
• Lectures
• Initiatives
• Research Events
• Interesting Papers
• Other Awesome Lists

Definitions

• "A digital twin is a virtual representation of real-world entities and processes, synchronized at a specified frequency and fidelity." (Digital Twin Consortium)
• "A digital twin is a digital representation of an active unique product (real device, object, machine, service, or intangible asset) or unique product-service system (a system consisting of a product and a related service) that acquires its selected characteristics, properties, conditions, and behaviours by means of models, information, and data within a single or even across multiple life cycle phases." (Acatech)
• "Digital representation sufficient to meet the requirements of a set of use cases." (Industrial Digital Twin Association)
• "A digital twin of a system consists of a set of models of the system and a set of digital shadows, both of which are purposefully updated on a regular basis, provides a set of services to use both purposefully with respect to the original system, and can send information about the environment and control commands to the original system."(Definition by the German Cluster of Excellence, updated after the Dagstuhl seminar on MDE of DTs)

Software Solutions

• Digital Twin Consortium Software Repository
• Eclipse Ditto - Open source framework for building build digital twins of devices connected to the internet.
• Asset Administration Shell - Open source software

Videos

• Talks of the Engineering Digital Twins – Seminar Series
• Computerphile video on Digital Twins - Great introduction video.

Books

• Digital Twin Driven Intelligent Systems and Emerging Metaverse - Springer: Digital Twin foundations and examples in different fields.

Lectures

• CanopyLAB - Future Technologies Series: Demystifying Digital Twin
• Coursera - Digital Twins and the Automotive Industry
• Coursera - Mastering Digital Twins
• Digital Twin: A Comprehensive Overview
• Digital Twin Technology
• Digital Twins: Enhancing Model-based Design with AR, VR and MR
• Mark Rochon Distinguished Lecture Series: Constructing a Human Digital Twin

Initiatives

• DigiTwins Initiative - Digital twins in healthcare.

• Digital Twin Consortium
• Eclipse Digital Twin - Collaborative, open source initiative at the Eclipse Foundation fostering the development of reference implementations for the activities driven by the Industrial Digital Twin Association (IDTA).
• Industrial Digital Twin Association

Research Events

• Dagstuhl-Seminar 22362: Model-Driven Engineering of Digital Twins (see the report)
• Engineering of Digital Twins Community
• Workshop on Digital Twin Architecture (TwinArch)
• Workshop on Model-Driven Engineering of Digital Twins (ModDiT'21)
• Workshop on Model-Driven Engineering of Digital Twins (ModDiT'22)
• Workshop on Model-Driven Engineering of Digital Twins (ModDiT'23)

Interesting Papers

2024

• I. David, D. Bork: Infonomics of Autonomous Digital Twins. Advanced Information Systems Engineering – 36th International Conference, CAiSE 2024, Limassol, Cyprus, 2024, Proceedings. 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science.
• J. Michael, M. Schwammberger, A. Wortmann: Explaining Cyberphysical System Behavior With Digital Twins. In IEEE Software, vol. 41, no. 1, pp. 55-63, Jan.-Feb. 2024.

2023

• I. David, P. Archambault; Q. Wolak; C. V. Vu; T. Lalonde; K. Riaz; E. Syriani; H. Sahraoui: Digital Twins for Cyber-Biophysical Systems: Challenges and Lessons Learned. 2023 ACM/IEEE 26th International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS), Västerås, Sweden, 2023, pp. 1-12.
• B. Combemale, J. Jézéquel, Q. Perez, D. Vojtisek, N. Jansen, J. Michael, F. Rademacher, B. Rumpe, A. Wortmann, J. Zhang: Model-Based DevOps: Foundations and Challenges. In: Int. Conf. on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems Companion (MODELS-C), pp. 429–433, ACM/IEEE, Oct. 2023.
• I. David, D. Bork: Towards a Taxonomy of Digital Twin Evolution for Technical Sustainability. 2023 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems Companion (MODELS-C), Västerås, Sweden, 2023, pp. 934-938.
• E. Ferko, A. Bucaioni, P. Pelliccione, M. Behnam: Standardisation in Digital Twin Architectures in Manufacturing. 2023 IEEE 20th International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA), L'Aquila, Italy, 2023, pp. 70-81.
• M. Heithoff, A. Hellwig, J. Michael, B. Rumpe: Digital Twins for Sustainable Software Systems. In: IEEE/ACM 7th Int. Workshop on Green And Sustainable Software (GREENS), P. Lago, R. Kazman (Eds.), pp. 19–23, IEEE, Jul. 2023.

2022

• Loek Cleophas, Thomas Godfrey, Djamel Eddine Khelladi, Daniel Lehner, Benoît Combemale, Mark van den Brand, Michael Vierhauser, Manuel Wimmer, Steffen Zschaler: A community-sourced view on engineering digital twins: a report from the EDT.Community. MoDELS (Companion) 2022: 481-485
• Romina Eramo, Francis Bordeleau, Benoît Combemale, Mark van den Brand, Manuel Wimmer, Andreas Wortmann: Conceptualizing Digital Twins. IEEE Softw. 39(2): 39-46 (2022)
• M. Dalibor, N. Jansen, B. Rumpe, D. Schmalzing, L. Wachtmeister, M. Wimmer, A. Wortmann (2022). A cross-domain systematic mapping study on software engineering for Digital Twins. Journal of Systems and Software, Volume 193, Art. 111361, Elsevier
• D. Bano, J. Michael, B. Rumpe, S. Varga, M. Weske: Process-Aware Digital Twin Cockpit Synthesis from Event Logs. Journal of Computer Languages (COLA), Volume 70, Elsevier
• M. Dalibor, M. Heithoff, J. Michael, L. Netz, J. Pfeiffer, B. Rumpe, S. Varga, A. Wortmann: Generating Customized Low-Code Development Platforms for Digital Twins. Journal of Computer Languages (COLA), Volume 70, Elsevier

2021

• Qi, Q., Tao, F., Hu, T., Anwer, N., Liu, A., Wei, Y., and others & Nee, A. Y. C. (2021). Enabling technologies and tools for digital twin. Journal of Manufacturing Systems, 58, 3-21: the paper describes 5 kinds of constituents of a digital twin, which are (1) physical entities, (2) data, (3) models, (4) services, (5) connections between these. DOI

2020

• Francis Bordeleau, Benoît Combemale, Romina Eramo, Mark van den Brand, Manuel Wimmer: Towards Model-Driven Digital Twin Engineering: Current Opportunities and Future Challenges. ICSMM 2020: 43-54

2018

• Kritzinger, W., Karner, M., Traar, G., Henjes, J., & Sihn, W. (2018). Digital Twin in manufacturing: A categorical literature review and classification. IFAC-PapersOnLine, 51(11), 1016-1022: the paper defines a digital twin as a digital object that receives data from and sends data to its physical twin. DOI

Other Awesome Lists

• Awesome Internet of things and sensor data