Sources of Complexity in the Development of Digital Twins in Manufacturing

Digital twins have emerged as a critical technology to enable smart production. Digital twins can enhance the current production system by optimizing the current setup and facilitating decision-making based on facts rather than gut feeling. Despite the numerous benefits explored, digital twins have faced many challenges in developing and implementing production systems. Their complexity is causing a lack of digital twin implementations in the production system. This complexity can be traced back to physical and virtual entities and the digital twin development process. By conducting a case study in a global manufacturing company, this publication explores the sources of complexity when developing digital twins. The findings are organized around the digital twin development steps and their corresponding complexity. The number of different types of entities being modeled, the choice of the modeling approach, modeling low-frequency events, emergent phenomena, and the unpredictability and variability of the manufacturing process are all examples of structural and dynamic complexity that have been found to impede success in digital twin applications. This research has implications for managers who are involved in the development of digital twins in their organizations. It can help with methodological guidance when dealing with an undefined and complicated process of digital twin development.