Understanding Practitioners’ Perspectives on Digital Twin: A Survey

Digital twin (DT) has gained an ever-increasing popularity in industry and academia for the real-time monitoring of physical systems for performance improvements. However, it is not easy to understand the practitioners’ thoughts on DTs with regard to industries’ (i) adoption of DTs, (ii) motivations for using DTs, (iii) development experiences on DTs, and (iv) challenges from different perspectives. In order to investigate those questions, we designed and conducted a survey. Our survey received 131 responses from various industries and profiles. We conducted our survey online and systematically performed the principles of survey methodology. In this paper, we present the results of this survey, which led to interesting findings. Some of those are as follows: (i) companies develop their DTs in-house rather than using DT-specific development tools and SaaS companies, (ii) simulation DTs are the most used systems, (iii) the top enabling technologies used in DTs are real-time data analysis and modeling, (iv) practitioners’ top motivations for using DTs are the real-time monitoring & control and cost savings, (v) practitioners use conventional programming technologies for developing DTs rather than DT-specific technologies, (vi) many key challenges have been observed such as the interoperability issues, data uncertainities, delays in real-time communication, security issues for the heterogenous device communications, lack of support for reuse in design and development, immature literature and lack of specialist and expertise. We believe that the survey results will be useful for many stakeholders, who use, develop, manage, and research & teach DTs.