Digital Twin Based Decision Support Services in Business Operations

With the advent of servitization and against the background of progressive digitalization, industrial value creation is increasingly shifting to service interactions at the customer interface. Companies are focusing less on selling goods and more on creating service values. The goods remain important as carriers of service values. The concepts of the Service-Dominant Logic (S-D Logic) prepare this shift in conceptual and theoretical foundations by providing a new perspective that puts the co-creation of values in service ecosystems at the core of the conceptual design. Service delivery is significantly supported by the increasing capabilities of digital and data-driven tools (Lusch and Nambisan, 2015). In business-to-business (B2B) environments, the benefits of services manifest themselves primarily in business-relevant decision making. By using data, the consequences of decisions can be better predicted, reducing uncertainty for management and increasing the quality of decisions. This paper examines the modeling of decision support by digital twins in business processes with a consistent focus on service value creation for the human actors in the system. For this purpose, decision making is modelled as a multi-stage process that can be represented by different elements of digital twins. The conceptual study is accompanied by an implementation in a real company case study. This case shows how the elements of digital twins interact to create service value and what kind of data is required to create this value.