Digital Twins in Software Engineering—A Systematic Literature Review and Vision

Abstract

Digital twins are a powerful consequence of digital transformation. In fact, they have been applied to many industries to enhance operations, predict needs, improve decision making, or optimize performance, even though the definition of digital twins is still evolving. However, their impact on the software industry is still limited. Thus, this work aims to analyze the current adoption of digital twins in the software industry as a potential path to integrate them into application lifecycle management. To achieve this objective, first, the significant characteristics of current digital twins are analyzed in their application to manufacturing to understand how the knowledge and the lessons learned can be transferred to the software industry. Second, a systematic literature review was conducted on Scopus, the Web of Science, and the ScienceDirect database. The literature review revealed 93 documents after data screening and cleaning 251 initial documents. Our main findings are that digital twins are already influencing and will significantly affect the software industry, revolutionizing various aspects of the software development lifecycle. This study tackles what identifies a digital twin in the software industry, the specific domains and areas where they can be applied in the software lifecycle, and the proposed approaches explored to build digital twins for developing, deploying, and maintaining software systems. Finally, this study proposes some guidelines for building digital twins in the context of application lifecycle management. Determining an appropriate roadmap shortly is essential to achieve a widespread applicability to building suitable digital twins and preparing organizations for the software industry.