A software engineering perspective on digital twin: many candidates, none elected

Antoine Beugnard (1, 2)

1 IMT Atlantique - INFO - Département Informatique
2 Lab-STICC_P4S - Equipe Processes for Safe and Secure Software and Systems

The digital twin (DT) is a central idea in the digitization of society. The goal of this position paper is to acknowledge this idea as a paradigm and discuss how current implementations are far from software engineering standards. I propose a consideration of 8 aspects of the DT: the paradigm, its concretization as a component, its variability, its building process, its description with models, type and instance differences, its relation with simulation, and its composability. I conclude that although many digital twins claim to be such, none of them fulfill the definition as expected. This position paper provides food for thought.

Keywords: software engineering; digital twin

Domains: Computer Science [cs]

Antoine Beugnard. A software engineering perspective on digital twin: many candidates, none elected. DigitalTwin 2023, IEEE Smart World Congress, Aug 2023, Portsmouth, United Kingdom. ⟨hal-04183036⟩