A Community-Sourced View on Engineering Digital Twins: A Report from the EDT.Community

Digital Twins are an important concept, enabling what-if scenario exploration, predictive maintenance, and other approaches. They help in saving time and physical resources when developing and evolving systems, whether natural or engineered. However, constructing and maintaining digital twins is a challenging engineering task – and, to date, there is a lack of understanding of the engineering techniques and methodologies required. To address these challenges, we created EDT.Community, a programme of seminars on the engineering of digital twins hosting digital twins experts from academia and industry. In this paper, we report on the main topics of discussion from the first year of the programme. We contribute by providing (1) a common understanding of open challenges in research and practice of the engineering of digital twins, and (2) an entry point to researchers who aim to close gaps in the current state of the art.