Digital Twins for Industry 4.0 and Beyond

Digital twins (DT) and cyber-physical systems (CPS) are two independently developed yet comparable supporting concepts for smart manufacturing, or “Industry 4.0” in a more popular term. Both of their working principle are based on a close interaction between a physical object and its digital counterpart. Such similarity arouses our curiosity on the association between them. The purpose of this study is to highlight the associations between DT and CPS. With the help of co-word analysis, we find that the two terms seldom co-appear in the literature. Nevertheless, they link to a similar set of enabling-technology terms although with different weighting on these terms, implying that they are established on a similar set of technologies. We suggest that topics within a field being developed independent of each other in the early stage is a common phenomenon. The two currently separate literature streams are likely to merge into one in the foreseeable future. We also discuss the future prospect of DT. Other than manufacturing, DT has great potential in applications such as health care and e-commerce.