Capability Building Blocks for Digital Twin Development

Industries are going through transformations by taking into consideration environmental effects, global developments and impact of corona on their business strategy. In addition to pure technology developments, the development of fast and efficient processes for new and existing product systems and the end-to-end digital networking of all value creation steps are essential prerequisites to support such transformations. In this context, the concept of Digital Twins is taking center stage in many industries, however, there are a limited number of generic methods/frameworks to develop Digital Twins, especially those which consider business goals, business processes and technologies. This paper presents a framework based on capability building blocks to develop Digital Twins for industries in any sector or lifecycle phase. The framework is split into three parts including the consideration of Digital Twin business goals, processes it affects/uses and capabilities which need to be considered to develop them. In addition, the framework is applied to identify and develop a use case and its Digital Twin capability elements, in the aviation sector.