Digital Twin for R&D organization: approaches and methods

Abstract

Competition encourages business to adopt the concept of digital twins. In some industries, digital twins have already found their place: there are digital twins of factories and cities. However, in industries where knowledge is the main product, digital twins are not yet in such demand. There is no doubt that scientific organizations have an internal core, corporate culture, values, which allow them to carry out unique research works. By modeling these internal, hidden, latent features of an organization, we can get unique tools for forecasting and managing a technical strategy. The digital twin of the science and technology center can be viewed as a particular type of model that reveals such hidden phenomena as the emergence of new research areas, the formation of scientific schools and the degree of creative burnout and fatigue of the team. Prototyping, as an engineering discipline, has existed for more than 30 years and, at first glance, does the same. However, unlike the prototype, the digital twin does not set goals for the rapid implementation of basic functionality for analyzing the operation of the system as a whole. Therefore, to understand the advantages of digital twin, we need to understand the new features that it provide. Going from the particular to the general, the authors selected a research and technology center for research and considered approaches to building a digital twin, and then summarized these approaches. As a result, an up-to-date formulation of research hypotheses was obtained, which need to be checked before creating a digital twin of an organization or its part aimed at producing new knowledge.