A Short Introduction to Digital Twins
The Industrial Internet Consortium’s (IIC)
vocabulary defines a digital twin as a digital
representation of an entity, including
attributes and behaviors, sufficient to meet
the requirements of a set of use cases. In this
context, the entity in the definition of digital
representation is typically an asset, process
or system. 1
This edition of the Journal of innovation
highlights some of the real-world
applications of digital twins, and this article
provides an IIC perspective on what are
digital twins and some of their technical
characteristics.
Digital twin information includes, but is not
limited to, combinations of the following
categories:
Visual models
Computations
D ESIGNING D IGITAL T WINS
A digital twin comprises data, computational
models (hereafter just “models”) and service
interfaces, such as an object in an object-
oriented programing language that has
member data, methods and interfaces.
Physics-based models and data
Analytical models and data
Time series data and historians
Transactional data
Master data
Figure 1: Designing a Digital Twin (Yo-i Information Technology) 2
1 Industrial Internet Consortium Vocabulary Report: https://www.iiconsortium.org/vocab/index.htm
2 http://middleeast.geblogs.com/en/lang-en/digital-power-plants-can-charge-egypts-economy/
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November 2019