Building a right digital twin with model engineering

In recent years, the concept of digital twin (DT) is attracting more and more attention from researchers and engineers. But there is still no consensus on what a right DT is. On one hand, some common models are renamed as DTs. On the other hand, some DTs extremely pursue ‘the same’ as physical objects, which bring unnecessary complexities to them. In this paper, we try to answer two questions from the point of view of model engineering: how to define a right digital twin, and how to build a right digital twin. The concept and related technologies of model engineering are introduced. Some basic principles and a set of metrics for a right DT are given. An evolutionary concurrent modeling method for DT (ECoM4DT) is proposed not only inheriting the theory from classic M&S methods but also highlighting the characteristics of DT compared with traditional models to systemically guide the DT modeling process.