IEEE Open Journal of Vehicular Technology (Jan 2023)

Digital Twins for Industry 4.0 in the 6G Era

  • Bin Han,
  • Mohammad Asif Habibi,
  • Bjoern Richerzhagen,
  • Kim Schindhelm,
  • Florian Zeiger,
  • Fabrizio Lamberti,
  • Filippo Gabriele Prattico,
  • Karthik Upadhya,
  • Charalampos Korovesis,
  • Ioannis-Prodromos Belikaidis,
  • Panagiotis Demestichas,
  • Siyu Yuan,
  • Hans D. Schotten

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1109/OJVT.2023.3325382
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 4
pp. 820 – 835

Abstract

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Having the Fifth Generation (5G) mobile communication system recently rolled out in many countries, the wireless community is now setting its eyes on the next era of Sixth Generation (6G). Inheriting from 5G its focus on industrial use cases, 6G is envisaged to become the infrastructural backbone of future intelligent industry. Especially, a combination of 6G and the emerging technologies of Digital Twins (DT) will give impetus to the next evolution of Industry 4.0 (I4.0) systems. This article provides a survey in the research area of 6G-empowered industrial DT system. With a novel vision of 6G industrial DT ecosystem, this survey discusses the ambitions and potential applications of industrial DT in the 6G era, identifying the emerging challenges as well as the key enabling technologies. The introduced ecosystem is supposed to bridge the gaps between humans, machines, and the data infrastructure, and therewith enable numerous novel application scenarios.

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