Ontologies in digital twins: A systematic literature review

Erkan Karabulut, Salvatore F. Pileggi, Paul Groth, Victoria Degeler

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

35 Scopus citations

Abstract

Digital Twins (DT) facilitate monitoring and reasoning processes in cyber–physical systems. They have progressively gained popularity over the past years because of intense research activity and industrial advancements. Cognitive Twins is a novel concept, recently coined to refer to the involvement of Semantic Web technology in DTs. Recent studies address the relevance of ontologies and knowledge graphs in the context of DTs, in terms of knowledge representation, interoperability and automatic reasoning. However, there is no comprehensive analysis of how semantic technologies, and specifically ontologies, are utilized within DTs. This Systematic Literature Review (SLR) is based on the analysis of 82 research articles, that either propose or benefit from ontologies with respect to DT. The paper uses different analysis perspectives, including a structural analysis based on a reference DT architecture, and an application-specific analysis to specifically address the different domains, such as Manufacturing and Infrastructure. The review also identifies open issues and possible research directions on the usage of ontologies and knowledge graphs in DTs.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)442-456
Number of pages15
JournalFuture Generation Computer Systems
Volume153
DOIs
StatePublished - Apr 2024
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Cyber–physical systems
  • Digital twin
  • Internet of things
  • Knowledge graphs
  • Ontology
  • Semantic web

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