Demystifying the buzzword behind Digital Twin: a novel generic evaluation model

Despite the growing popularity of digital twin (DT) developments, there is a lack of common understanding and definition for important concepts of DT. It is needed to address this gap by building a shared understanding of DT before it becomes an obstacle for future work. With this challenge in view, the objective of our study is to assess the existing DT from various domains on a common basis and to unify the knowledge and understanding of DT developers and stakeholders before practice. To achieve this goal, we conducted a systematic literature review and analyzed 25 selected papers to identify and discuss the characteristics of existing DT's. The review shows an inconsistency and case-specific choices of dimensions in assessing DT. Therefore, this article proposes a four-dimensional evaluation framework to assess the maturity of digital twins across different domains, focusing on the characteristics of digital models. The four identified dimensions in this model are Capability, Cooperability, Coverage, and Lifecycle. Additionally, a weight mechanism is implemented inside the model to adapt the importance of each dimension for different application requirements. Several case studies are devised to validate the proposed model in general, industrial and scientific cases.