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Submission deadline: 6 July 2022
Publication: November/December 2022
With the proliferation of distributed computing and virtualization technologies (from the devices to the edge up to the cloud), the concept of Digital Twins as software representations of physical systems is constantly expanding. This representation augments and makes programmable the description of systems lifecycle, as well as the usage of real-time and sensor-based data updates and functionality simulation. Characteristic examples include manufacturing, complex system management (such as nuclear plants), healthcare, and life sciences, and it is moving towards arts and culture, cultural heritage, and education.
In the course of advancing even more the concept of the digital representation of physical entities towards the representation of a whole lifecycle, the concept of the digital thread has been introduced, in an attempt to record all information related to a system, a product, a practice, or a process throughout its lifetime, from creation/generation to termination/removal.
And while the above constitutes a mere attempt to digitally clone the physical (both over space and time), the dawn of machine intelligence comparable to human intellect has come to empower the digital replicas of the physical entities with the ability of autonomy and the power to mimic behaviors and patterns, through training over large datasets, and through
different ways of learning and reasoning similar to those used by humans.
As an inevitable result, the merging of the two worlds (physical and software/virtual) is happening. The recently presented vision of metaverse by Facebook provides a glimpse of a future to come, where digital clones (of high accuracy?) of the physical will exist, interact with, complement, and even substitute the (physical) originals.
In an attempt to report and investigate the potential of the digital twins and threads towards cloning the physical, this special issue of IT Professional is seeking high-quality contributions from industry, government, business, and academia that present recent advances in the following (not limiting) topics of interest:
The intent is to cover from the science to the practice to the applications.
For author information and guidelines on submission criteria, please visit the IT Pro Author Information page. Please submit papers through the ScholarOne system, and be sure to select the special-issue name. Manuscripts should not be published or currently submitted for publication elsewhere. Please submit only full papers intended for review, not abstracts, to the ScholarOne portal.
Please contact the guest editors at it5-2022@computer.org.
