What-if considerations in digital twinning: An autorarchic approach

In current practice, digital twins are often created with a set of perspectives in mind. This makes it difficult to separate the content of its structure, which results in less tailored use of the digital twin. Next to that, it becomes hard to utilise the information supplied by the digital twin as different users have different perspectives, and therefore expect and need different information to make decisions. Digital twins can be seen as recursive, which means that a digital twin consists of multiple digital twins with different granularity and functionality. The modularity of digital twins creates a hierarchy between these digital twins. In current practice, this implies that digital twins may encompass and thus prevail over others. This article proposes an autorarchic approach to digital twinning, which can be used to make informed decisions and determine the impact of modules based on their dependence of and relation to other modules. Additionally, this approach allows for the creation of tailored digital twin hierarchies (autorarchies) for specific users, thus creating instantiated and controlled digital twins.