Towards a generalized digital twin definition

Abstract: Several definitions exist for Digital Twins, which are based on industry 4.0 technologies. Going beyond, a wider definition is proposed which is focused on obtaining knowledge and foresight to improve re- and pro- active decision-making, for enhancing validation, assessment and control. A six-level classification schema is proposed, equally applicable to buildings, embedded systems and processes at all phases from design to demolishing. A digital twin is seen as the marriage of semantic with numeric, namely the fusion of semantic methods with numerical methods first of all computational engineering but also sensing, data mining and Artificial Intelligence methods.