Schematic categorization and definition of Applied and Target-oriented Digital Twins

Digital Twins are of high interest in a variety of research fields as well as industry sectors because they enable, among other things, more efficient maintenance and faster product development and production planning. However, current definitions of Digital Twins in the literature are often varying, contradictory, or noncomprehensive from a practitioner’s perspective. Therefore, no universally accepted standardized definition for the development of Digital Twins exists. Thus, we propose a shift in the current scientific discussion towards economic and target-oriented concepts. Our main thesis is that there exists no ubiquitous Digital Twin but specialized concepts for different industry sectors, stakeholders, and applications. We discuss this idea further in the context of the automotive industry. We propose a framework to differentiate versions of a Digital Twin expressed by a morphological  matrix in order to make a distinction from pure simulation models. In future work, the usefulness of this framework should be tested and applied for more industry sectors.