Are We There Yet? – Use Cases and Requirements for the Industrial Metaverse

The manufacturing industry is constantly looking for new technologies to improve their structures, optimize processes, maximize profit, reduce cost, and improve quality. One such new technology is the metaverse. The metaverse uses a fully interconnected set of Digital Twins (DTs) that spans all parts of industrial production processes and company administration, thus enabling complex company and production insights. Implementations of metaverses in industrial processes are currently still rare, although there are concepts that promise major benefits. So why have these concepts not yet been used on a large scale in industrial production? To investigate this, we collect and discuss industrial use cases and derive requirements for a metaverse at industrial scale. With these requirements, we analyze existing architectures with respect to their applicability not only within big enterprises, but also at small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Furthermore, we present a vision for the Industrial Metaverse (IM) which fits current and future industrial needs. Finally, current open research questions are highlighted and future research directions are presented, with the ultimate goal of providing not only a further theoretical framework, but a broadly usable IM implementation.