Product Digital Twins (DTs) are digital representations of a physical asset that update synchronously throughout its lifecycle. Over the past decade, a rich and varied literature on the development of new technologies and approaches to implementing product DTs has emerged. This literature has been reviewed multiple times, but the variety in focus and scope of DT reviews has become so extensive that it is challenging to assess our collective understanding and knowledge of DT theory. We address this issue by conducting a systematic umbrella review of product DT reviews, classifying and analysing review themes to understand strengths and shortcomings of product DT literature. Our analysis reveals a key shortcoming in the product DT literature: There is currently little evidence and understanding of DT value. Understanding how DTs provide value to an organisation is of paramount importance, as it will determine the elements of the DT that truly have an effect on value, as well as the mechanisms by which that value is created. We conclude this work by presenting a five-item research agenda to address these shortcomings and develop our understanding of DT value. Since DTs can be complex and expensive to implement, research and practice should focus on those elements of the DT that provide value to the organisation.
This research focuses on trading card quality inspection, where defects have a significant effect on both the quality inspection and grading. The present inspection procedure is subjective which means the grading is sensitive to mistakes made by individuals. To address this, a deep neural network based on transfer learning for automated defect detection is proposed with a particular emphasis on corner grading which is a crucial factor in overall card grading. This paper presents an extension of our prior study, in which we achieved an accuracy of 78% by employing the VGG-net and InceptionV3 models. In this study, our emphasis is on the DenseNet model where convolutional layers are used to extract features and regularisation methods including batch normalisation and spatial dropout are incorporated for better defect classification. Our approach outperformed prior findings, as evidenced by experimental results based on a real dataset provided by our industry partner, achieving an 83% mean accuracy in defect classification. Additionally, this study investigates various calibration approaches to fine-tune the model confidence. To make the model more reliable, a rule-based approach is incorporated to classify defects based on confidence scores. Finally, a human-in-the-loop system is integrated to inspect the misclassified samples. Our results demonstrate that the model’s performance and confidence are expected to improve further when a large number of misclassified samples, along with human feedback, are used to retrain the network.