Digital Twin and Big Data Towards Smart Manufacturing and Industry 4.0: 360 Degree Comparison

TLDR

Advances in big data and digital twin technologies are driving the global shift toward smart manufacturing, with data‑driven intelligence and integrated analysis improving all manufacturing aspects and digital twins enabling critical cyber‑physical integration. This paper reviews the concepts and applications of big data and digital twin in manufacturing and explores how their integration can advance smart manufacturing. The authors compare the similarities and differences between big data and digital twin from general and data perspectives.

Abstract

With the advances in new-generation information technologies, especially big data and digital twin, smart manufacturing is becoming the focus of global manufacturing transformation and upgrading. Intelligence comes from data. Integrated analysis for the manufacturing big data is beneficial to all aspects of manufacturing. Besides, the digital twin paves a way for the cyber-physical integration of manufacturing, which is an important bottleneck to achieve smart manufacturing. In this paper, the big data and digital twin in manufacturing are reviewed, including their concept as well as their applications in product design, production planning, manufacturing, and predictive maintenance. On this basis, the similarities and differences between big data and digital twin are compared from the general and data perspectives. Since the big data and digital twin can be complementary, how they can be integrated to promote smart manufacturing are discussed.