Digital Twins in Industry 4.0 Manufacturing: Challenges and Opportunities
Andrew Mendoza, Majid Moghaddam
11/08/2026
As manufacturing advances within the Industry 4.0 paradigm, digital twins have emerged as a key enabler of smart manufacturing. In general, a digital twin is a virtual representation of a physical asset, process, or system that supports data exchange between the physical and digital domains in a manufacturing environment.
Digital twins offer several advantages, including real-time or near-real-time monitoring, process optimization, predictive capabilities, and the ability to integrate and analyze large volumes of system data. By harnessing these data-driven capabilities, these assets transform how industries approach manufacturing.
In this article, digital twins are reviewed alongside traditional engineering modeling techniques, such as computational fluid dynamics and finite element methods. This comparative analysis serves to bridge a gap between established technologies and emerging technologies that shift the scope of manufacturing. Because digital twins are still evolving and their definitions and implementations vary across domains, several challenges and limitations remain to be addressed; these are discussed in the present work.