Though the term digital twin was occasionally in use in the virtual reality and manufacturing community as a concept in the mid-1990s, Dr.Michael Grieves explic

Though the term digital twin was occasionally in use in the virtual reality and manufacturing community as a concept in the mid-1990s, Dr.Michael Grieves explicitly defined the term in 2001 for a digital version of a physical system as part of an overall product lifecycle process. The term has been widely used in manufacturing since then and has been a key sales messaging for companies like IBM, Dassault Systems, Siemens amongst others. United Technologies for example have been demonstrating digital twin concepts for routing in flight engine telematics into 3D virtual engine simulations for trouble shooting and maintenance since 2005. The term regularly crops up in manufacturing, maintenance, smart cities, IoT and more recently AI related proposals and projects and generally means a virtual simulation that uses real data to simulate a complex system. As pointed out by many over the years - the concepts are also described by Prof.David Gelernter in his book 'MIrror Worlds: Or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox...How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean' first ipublished in 1991. SO perhaps less bizarre and more just less familiar on HN.