An Expert Survey on Models and Digital Twins

Abstract: Digital Twins (DTs) are becoming increasingly vital for future industrial applications, enhancing monitoring, control, and optimization of physical assets. This enhancement is made possible by integrating various Digital Models (DMs) within DTs, which must interoperate to represent different system aspects and fulfill diverse application purposes. However, industry perspectives on the challenges and research needs for integrating these models are rarely obtained. Thus, this study conducts an expert survey across multiple application domains to identify and analyze the challenges in utilizing diverse DMs within DTs. The results reveal missing standardized interfaces, high manual adaptation effort, and limited support for model reuse across lifecycle phases, highlighting future research needs in automated model composition and semantics-based interoperability.