Ship’s Digital Twin—A Review of Modelling Challenges and Applications

Abstract

The Ship’s Digital Twin (SDT) is a digital record of a ship’s behaviour or a software clone, which can be used to simulate scenarios that are expensive or hardly feasible to perform on a real object and especially in real time. The purpose of the SDT is to achieve cost reduction, obtain timely warnings of irregularities, and optimise individual ship system performances or the operation of the whole ship and to assist ship management. The aim of this paper is to describe the concept of the SDT and clarify some perplexities that may occur from initial introduction to concept. To that end, the paper identifies the steps in the SDT formulation process and methods used in each step of the process. Furthermore, a four-step iterative procedure for the SDT development is proposed. The applications of the concept are numerous, and some of them are presented in a review analysis in this paper. The presented analysis leads to a conclusion that should give some direction to future research in this area.