Digital Twin Concept Diagram

Definition, Concept, Implementation and Lifecycle.
1. Definition
(a) Grieves and Vickers (3) “The premise driving the model was that each system consisted of two systems, the physical system that has always existed and a new virtual system that contained all of the information about the physical system. This meant that there was a mirroring or twinning of systems between what existed in real space to what existed in virtual space and vice versa.” “The Digital Twin is a set of virtual information constructs that fully describes a potential or actual physical manufactured product from the micro atomic level to the macro geometrical level.”
(b) General Electric (4) “A digital twin is a dynamic digital representation of an industrial asset, that
As an example, a DTP can contain the 3D model of the asset, as well as the Bill of Materials and Bill of Processes describing how to manufacture that asset. Digital Twin Prototype does not refer to a specific instance of the asset. It’s rather a recipe for manufacturing an asset.
(ii) Digital twin instance (DTI) A DTI is about a single specific physical instance of an asset. It can contain the list of exact part numbers that went into production of this specific asset, and the exact process steps that were followed in producing the given asset. The Digital Twin Instance also contains the current operational states captured from the sensors connected to the assets. Multiple separate physical assets could be manufactured using a single Digital Twin Prototype, and each of them can have their own Digital Twin
Unlike the DTI, the DTA cannot be an independent data structure. It can be a computing mechanism that has access to all DTIs and interacts with them either ad-hoc or proactively. On an ad hoc basis, the computing logic might ask, “What is the Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) of component X.” Proactively, the DTA might continually examine sensor readings and correlate those sensor readings with failures to enable prognostics.
(c) Digital Twin Environment (DTE) This is an integrated, multi-domain application space for operating on Digital Twins for a variety of purposes. These purposes can include:
(i) Predictive Digital Twin can be used for predicting future behavior and performance of the physical asset. At the Prototype stage, the prediction would be of the behavior of the designed asset with components that vary between its high and low tolerances in order to ascertain that the as-designed asset met the proposed requirements. In the Instance stage, the prediction would be a specific instance of a specific physical asset that incorporated actual components and component history. The predictive performance would be based from current point in the asset’s lifecycle at its current state and move forward. Multiple instances of the asset can be aggregated to provide a range of possible future