Digital twin-enabled smart industrial systems: a bibliometric review

Abstract

The aim of this study is to investigate the body of literature on digital twins, exploring, in particular, their role in enabling smart industrial systems. This review adopts a dynamic and quantitative bibliometric method including works citations, keywords co-occurrence networks and keywords burst detection with the aim of clarifying the main contributions to this research area and highlighting prevalent topics and trends over time. The analysis performed on citations traces the backbone of contributions to the topic, visible within the main path. Keywords co-occurrence networks depict the prevalent issues addressed, tools implemented and application areas. The burst detection completes the analysis identifying the trends and most recent research areas characterizing research on the digital twin topic.Decision-making, process design and life cycle as well as the enabling role in the adoption of the latest industrial paradigms emerge as the prevalent issues addressed by the body of literature on digital twins. In particular, the up-to-date issues of real-time systems and industry 4.0 technologies, closely related to the concept of smart industrial systems, characterize the latest research trajectories identified in the literature on digital twins. In this context, the digital twin can find new opportunities for application in manufacturing, control and services.

Mapping of Warehouse Radio Frequency Identification Research: A Bibliometric Analysis

“…VOSViewer can facilitate future researchers' endeavors to ascertain the trajectory of the study and acquire a comprehensive understanding of RFID in warehouses. The network, nodes, and keywords are represented on the map with varying dimensions based on their frequency and colored markers that indicate their membership in distinct clusters [20]. Using VOSviewer, search parameters, such as keywords, time range, and other constraints, were adjusted to select publications relevant to research on RFID in warehouses.…”

BIM, digital twin and cyber-physical systems: crossing and blurring boundaries

“…Finally, beginning to relate these different systems to one another as to achieve the third level of a system of systems. While taking a similar stance that Digital Twin and CPS are two separate yet highly related concepts, Ciano et al (2020) outlines evidence that suggests that CPS is an evolution of embedded systems where the CPS network can coordinate and integrate computation and physical processes. Computational components serve to monitor, detect and activate physical elements.…”

Contrasting digital twin vision of manufacturing with the industrial reality

“…Shao and Helu (2020) claim that real-time visualizations are the key innovation of digital twins. For a more comprehensive review of digital twin definitions, see, e.g., Negri, Fumagalli, and Macchi (2017); Kritzinger et al (2018); Jones et al (2020); Ciano et al (2020).…”

“…Ciano et al (2020) provide a bibliometric review of digital twin-enabled smart industrial systems, while, finally,Liu et al (2020) present a comprehensive and up-to-date review of the field and current industrial applications.Even though some authors (e.g Wright and Davidson (2020)…”