Digital twinning for purpose-driven information management in production

Abstract The current technology push towards Industry 4.0 has provoked companies to gather exponential larger amounts of data. The sheer amount of data, as well as the implicit and explicit interrelations have increased the organisational complexity. As a result, companies lose control, have difficulties in reaching decisions, while unknowingly creating information and knowledge gaps – irrespective of the abundance of data available. Digital twinning technology can be instrumental to this problem. The technology allows for reasoning from the information content, bringing together the current situation and the expected course of process, while simultaneously aiming to predict future possibilities based on the information content. To achieve an effective and efficient implementation of digital twinning technology a purpose-driven approach is proposed. An approach towards defining the purpose can be facilitated by following the 3P characterisation: Purpose, Perspective and Priority. The incorporation of the 3P characterisation will lead information provision that is derived from the defined purpose. This can also be called purpose-driven information management. In this paper two projects are explained that will be used as use-cases to evaluate and validate the theory of purpose-driven information management and the 3P characterisation.