Guidelines for providing digital twins

Digital twins, as digital representations of physical assets, have the ability to transform traditional factories into smart factories with interconnected machines. Standardized digital twins, such as the asset administration shell, are critical components of Industry 4.0 because they enable machines and machine components to communicate with one another. Within a few years, all companies that supply machines or components for Industry 4.0 enabled production are expected to be able to provide digital twins for their products. Despite the increasing standardization, production companies face technical and organizational challenges in creating and delivering these digital representations. The lack of a company-wide understanding leads to unclear responsibilities and missing guidelines, while undefined information requirements and a legacy IT infrastructure with rarely available data remain unaddressed challenges. The current literature lacks the necessary supporting resources to overcome these obstacles. This paper aims to address these challenges by proposing a comprehensive process model and providing supporting tools for the development of digital twins alongside physical products. The process model offers a set of guidelines for companies to progress from a state of unawareness to one of providing tailored digital twins to their customers. The guidelines cover training on digital twins and its standards, analysis of business processes and use cases, and examination of relevant products and IT systems. It enables the utilization of software solutions to create the desired digital twins in an iterative manner and provide them to customers.