Digital Twinning Future Trends Evaluation Framework: A Digital Twins Approach

The contemporary Digital Twinning Paradigm (DTP) emerges from the synergy of conceptual development and experiences gained through the digital transformation of real-world Cyber–Physical and Sociotechnical Systems. Balancing current practices and future trends of Digital Twinning concepts and technologies, framed by maturity and futureness evaluation and assessment, is an invariant. The intended mission of this research article is to perform the following: first, to establish and collect an open pool of digital twinning future trends and second, to specify the foundations for the development of a Digital Twinning Future Trends Evaluation Digital Twins-based framework. The proposed in-depth explainable (unleashed) systematic literature review methodology aided in fulfilling the first part of a mission, while the second one emerged from the transposition of characteristics of complementary maturity evaluation frameworks’ characteristics and digital twins referent architectures. The key research hypothesis is that the formation of a future trends persistence database precedes the backward-tracking analysis, enabling the isolation of the persistence rationale. These rationalities then drive the DTP model refinements to foster further prediction accuracy. The research outcomes suggest that, in general, a more rigorous justification of research suitability is necessary and highlight certain obstacles affecting the representativeness of review-based publishing. Through the continuous improvement of the future trends data layer, coupled with a comprehensive repertoire of cross-related research publications, the proposed framework enables the assessment of future trends in the DTP or other paradigms through the proposed Digital Twins Reference Architecture.