Towards a Maturity Model for Intelligent Digital Twins in Manufacturing

The adoption of Digital Twins (DTs) in manufacturing is promising as they hold the potential to bring key changes in the way industrial systems are managed and optimized. As enabling technologies continue to emerge, their integration into these complex systems enhances the granularity of intelligence and functionalities available within the Cyber-physical Systems. Such granularity accentuates the need to clarify the distinctive features of this emerging class of DTs, where the transition from Conventional DTs to Intelligent DTs marks a shift towards increasingly proactive, autonomous, and cognitive systems. This paper particularly explores the evolution of Intelligent DTs, focusing on formalizing the enhanced intelligence in correspondent maturity levels that express the progression on DT systems. The maturity levels of Intelligent DTs are categorized into predictive, prescriptive, and autonomous stages, to then identify both the associated capabilities and technologies across different application domains related to manufacturing. On its whole, the outcome of this paper can be seen both as a current map on the maturity of Intelligent DTs implementation, and as a research agenda to explore capabilities and technologies from different domains in manufacturing.