Revolution on digital twin technology—a patent research approach.

Digital twin (DT) can facilitate interaction between the physical and the cyber worlds and achieve smart manufacturing. However, the DT's development in the industry remains vague. This study investigates the global patent databases of DT patents and summarizes related technologies, effects, and applications. Patent map analysis is used to uncover the patent development trajectory of DT in the patent databases of the USA, China, and the World Intellectual Property Organization among European nations. In addition, a nation-based survey is conducted to explore their DT patent trends. Findings reveal that DT fails to form a comprehensively connected technology, which is a typical phenomenon for a technology that remains in its early stage of development. In the present study, the two-dimensional matrix analysis of patent technology and effect exhibits that several patents created a variety of effects and reached saturation. Moreover, several technology–effect domains remain, and DT-related technology gaps exist in a number of potential effects. The DT-related patents are distributed unevenly in various industries. For instance, most of the DT-related patents appear in the manufacturing industry. Furthermore, our K-mode cluster analysis reveals that the DT-related patents are distributed in five subgroups of the three dimensions, namely, technology, effect, and application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]