Properties and Characteristics of Digital Twins: Review of Industrial Definitions

As digital twin configurations depend on their use case, there is a need for research on how companies can select the capabilities and appropriate level of sophistication to deploy digital twins in practice successfully. This study investigated the properties and characteristics of digital twins described in academic literature. It summarized them in a taxonomy, which was subsequently used to code and examine 90 definitions of companies. For the analysis, both supervised and unsupervised methods were applied. The results show that researchers focus more on technological requirements when defining digital twins, while companies use more value-based properties that are not included or not precisely delineated in academic reviews. Therefore, an application-oriented definition is proposed to bridge this gap and complement the taxonomy. This study thus contributes to the discussion and forming of an application-oriented and shared understanding of the digital twin concept in research and practice.