Digital twin

A digital twin is a digital model of an intended or actual real-world physical product, system, or process (a physical twin) that serves as the effectively indistinguishable digital counterpart of it for practical purposes, such as simulation, integration, testing, monitoring, and maintenance.^[1][2][3]

A digital twin is set of adaptive models that emulate the behaviour of a physical system in a virtual system getting real time data to update itself along its life cycle. The digital twin replicates the physical system to predict failures and opportunities for changing, to prescribe real time actions for optimizing and/or mitigating unexpected events observing and evaluating the operating profile system.^[2] Though the concept originated earlier (as a natural aspect of computer simulation generally), the first practical definition of a digital twin originated from NASA in an attempt to improve the physical-model simulation of spacecraft in 2010.^[4] Digital twins are the result of continual improvement in modeling and engineering.

In the 2010s and 2020s, manufacturing industries began moving beyond digital product definition to extending the digital twin concept to the entire manufacturing process. Doing so allows the benefits of virtualization to be extended to domains such as inventory management including lean manufacturing, machinery crash avoidance, tooling design, troubleshooting, and preventive maintenance. Digital twinning therefore allows extended reality and spatial computing to be applied not just to the product itself but also to all of the business processes that contribute toward its production.