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Scope

  • genre: survey
  • language: en-GB
  • draft: content/drafts/dt/survey.md
  • created: 2026-09-15
  • corpus: 214 citekeys, digest a31f0c4b77de
  • draft digest: not recorded (run dossier stamp once the draft is ready)

Reader

A first-year PhD student who has a control-engineering background, has read perhaps five digital-twin papers, and needs to know what the field agrees on, where it contradicts itself, and which questions are still open enough to build a thesis on.

Covers

Definitional families and how they differ; fidelity as a design choice rather than a quality score; synchronisation between asset and model, including staleness and dropped links; and validation practice -- how little of it exists, and what the papers that attempt it actually do.

Does not cover

Vendor platforms and middleware: the corpus holds three papers naming products, none of which compares them, so anything written here would be a summary of marketing rather than of evidence.

Manufacturing-floor case studies. Deliberate -- the reader's thesis is in water infrastructure, and the transfer argument is a section of their own chapter rather than of this survey.

Security and access control. Not a scoping judgement but a corpus one: seven candidates were retrieved and all seven were position papers with no evaluation, so the theme is named here rather than written thinly.

Glossary

  • Digital twin -- a virtual representation of an asset with automatic, bidirectional data flow between the two.
  • Digital shadow -- automatic flow from asset to model only. The distinction is load-bearing in this survey: several papers claim "twin" for what this definition calls a shadow.
  • Fidelity -- how closely the model reproduces the asset's behaviour on the quantities the twin's decision depends on, never in general.
  • Staleness -- the age of the newest synchronised value, in seconds.
  • Validation -- comparison of twin output against measurements from the physical asset. Reserved for that; agreement between two models is called cross-verification here.