Current Trends in Digital Twin Development, Maintenance, and Operation: An Interview Study

Digital twins (DT) are often defined as a pairing of a physical entity and acorresponding virtual entity (VE), mimicking certain aspects of the formerdepending on the use-case. In recent years, this concept has facilitatednumerous use-cases ranging from design to validation and predictive maintenanceof large and small high-tech systems. Various heterogeneous cross-domain modelsare essential for such systems and model-driven engineering plays a pivotalrole in the design, development, and maintenance of these models. We believemodels and model-driven engineering play a similarly crucial role in thecontext of a VE of a DT. Due to the rapidly growing popularity of DTs and theiruse in diverse domains and use-cases, the methodologies, tools, and practicesfor designing, developing, and maintaining the corresponding VEs differ vastly.To better understand these differences and similarities, we performed asemi-structured interview research with 19 professionals from industry andacademia who are closely associated with different lifecycle stages of digitaltwins. In this paper, we present our analysis and findings from this study,which is based on seven research questions. In general, we identified anoverall lack of uniformity in terms of the understanding of digital twins andused tools, techniques, and methodologies for the development and maintenanceof the corresponding VEs. Furthermore, considering that digital twins aresoftware intensive systems, we recognize a significant growth potential foradopting more software engineering practices, processes, and expertise invarious stages of a digital twin's lifecycle.