Designing digital twins: a graph-based schema to enable systematic cost-benefit analysis

ABSTRACT: This paper posits that a Digital Twin can be viewed as a collection of nodes and edges where nodes represent actions on/with data and edges represent the flow of data between nodes. The paper provides a schema whereby the nodes and edges can be defined and the costs and benefits can be attributed, as well as analysis techniques enabled by the schema. The potential of the schema in supporting the design of Digital Twins is then demonstrated through a worked example, in which it is shown that traditional bottom-up cost estimates significantly overestimate costs when compared with this approach.