Methodology for Digital Twin Use Cases: Definition, Prioritization, and Implementation

The cross-industry concept of Digital Twin promises numerous benefits in areas such as product customization and predictive maintenance, but many companies often struggle to determine a starting point. Digital Twin use cases are abundant, but efforts and stakeholder benefits are difficult to estimate when developing and implementing Digital Twin applications. This paper proposes a management approach to Digital Twin use case prioritization suitable for planning Digital Twin applications at an early phase of development. Considering stakeholder satisfaction, infrastructure scalability, and effort for implementation and maintenance, we present a methodology to determine the most impactful Digital Twin use cases requiring low effort and high scalability. Tools and related methods from the fields of software development, innovation, process engineering, and product development are described, and the methodology is discussed with regard to these and other research works. An example from mechatronic product development at Siemens Healthineers Innovation Think Tank validates the approach.