Digital Twins in the Internet of Things Context

Digital Twin is a term currently popular among researchers in the context of digitalization, Cyber-Physical Systems and Industry 4.0. Therefore, this paper gives a brief history of the Digital Twin concept and presents its main components as they have been introduced by two well known architectures. Different applications of Digital Twins in manufacturing, healthcare, smart cities, and agriculture are shown. Their analysis emphasized that the implementation of the Digital Twin concept is still in its infancy and several key challenges must be considered. Among those, communications, big data analysis, and security have received the most attention from the research community and industry. Two different architectures, that use two different communication protocols to transmit the acquired data describing the physical system to be replicated in the digital world are given as use-case systems. These identify the Internet of Things vision as a key enabler of Digital Twin implementations.