A human factors approach to design an information interface model for a digital twin

• Introduced a human factors approach to design Digital Twin user interfaces. • Integrated Cognitive Work Analysis with Unified Modeling Language models. • Personas applied to Cognitive Work Analysis to capture individual information needs. • Validated the approach through a battery digital passport case study. • Interface design was enhanced by reducing information-gathering iterations. A Digital Twin requires a user interface to deliver information relevant to its users, hence a model is required to represent the information required by the interface. The objective of this research is to develop a transdisciplinary human factors approach to information gathering and modelling to design Digital Twin information interfaces. Existing approaches to interface modelling either do not consider human factors or those that do provide a high-level view of information insufficient to capture the complexities required for an information interface for a Digital Twin. The approach presented here consists of capturing the information interface requirements using Cognitive Work Analysis to analyse the human-information interaction and structuring this information via Unified Modelling Language (UML) models. To understand human information requirements when interacting with a Digital Twin interface, personas are used to guide the CWA. To illustrate this approach a Digital Twin of an Industrial Gearbox Product-Service is considered. Validation was conducted through a case study with a research and technology organisation. The approach was found to be clear and able to provide information customised to user needs and the level of detail required. The research described creates a more effective approach to creating a Digital Twin information interface model through reducing the number of iterations required to gather information. By specifically considering human interactions the transdisciplinary approach advanced here will augment the development of software systems.