Towards Responsible Digital Twins

A digital twin is a virtual representation of real-world entities and processes, synchronized at a specified frequency and fidelity. The capability of digital twins is continually evolving from simple decision support, via decision augmentation for end users to autonomous decision automation. This evolution is enabled by increasingly sophisticated technologies used by digital twins, e.g. advanced analytics, IoT and AI. In many applications, multiple digital twins can be used to address different system functionality, and composed as required, leading to potentially quite complex technical systems. Digital twins further increasingly require explicit consideration of socio-economic factors, to ensure building responsible digital twin solutions, minimizing potential harm for the users. This paper discusses how such socio-economic factors, particularly the enterprise, legal and ethics policies and various value constraints, can be gradually transformed into a set of governance rules for building, operating and evolving responsible digital twin solutions and ecosystems. These policies include voluntary type of rules, e.g. digital ethics norms, as well as regulatory policies, which impose formal legal obligations, e.g. legislative and regulatory mechanisms. We use two application domains at two ends of the complexity spectrum, namely personalized health care and renewable energy, to illustrate our approach.