System Thinking Approach for Digital Twin Analysis

The importance of Digital Twins in research and industry is continuously increasing. Their applications, studied and implemented to date, confirm that they are a valuable tool in the evolution process from the traditional factory towards the Smart Factory, in the direction promoted by Industry 4.0. Different definitions of Digital Twin have been proposed by the scientific community with the aim of providing the one that could uniquely and consistently describe all the applications already featured. Such effort to create a unique definition of Digital Twin is very important since it may allow researchers to have guidelines for better understanding the different aspects of its main concepts. The present paper reports a systematic research on the state of the art, especially from recent literature, to show the main issues that could not allow univocal definition of Digital Twin. The aim of this work is to apply the principles of System Thinking to the definitions of Digital Twins already presented in literature. The result of this approach has made possible to represent the well-known concepts in a completely new conceptual framework allowing a potential strengthening of both the theoretical foundations and the tools with the aim to support the development of Digital Twins.