Digital twin for smart manufacturing: a review of concepts towards a practical industrial implementation

Latest trends and developments in digital technologies have enabled a new manufacturing model. Digital systems can monitor, optimize and control processes by creating a virtual copy of the physical world and making decentralized decisions. This paradigm relies on the development of a digital counterpart, the Digital Twin, for each production resource taking part to the whole manufacturing process. Although real applications of Digital Twin may differ in technical and operational details, in the past years, a huge effort has been done in order to identify and define focal functionalities and properties, as well as main challenges for the practical implementation within real factories. This paper is intended to review and analyse principles, ideas and technological solutions of the Digital Twin vision for production processes focusing on the practical industrial implementation. The purpose of this document is therefore to summarize the current state-of-art on Digital Twin concepts, and to draw their up-to-date state for application and deployment in real industrial processes. Finally, future directions for further research are discussed.