Keywords: multidisciplinary design optimization, digital twins, domain decomposition methods, uncertainty quantification, augmented and virtual reality, optimization.

Digital Twins (DTs) have received significant recent attention due to their transformative potential across various application domains, involving design, manufacturing, operations, and maintenance. They promise to enhance decision-making, enable predictive maintenance, improve operational efficiency, and manage complex systems. However, their design and deployment pose challenges, especially when moving beyond the widely used ‘digital shadow’ model prevalent in many industrial applications. This overview paper explores the concept of Digital Twins (DTs) and how they fundamentally represent a system-of-systems. The system-of-systems framework captures how DTs interconnect multiple subsystems to function cohesively and adaptively. Multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) tools and methods are considered critical in DT design and deployment. Special attention is required for issues such as modeling fidelity, uncertainty quantification, data analytics and integration, and real-time synchronization. Emerging tools involving artificial intelligence, machine learning, edge computing, and VR/AR-based human-machine interactions hold promise for exciting advancements in this technology.

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