Managing Intellectual Property Issues with Digital Twins

The application of Digital Twins is increasing across industry sectors from transport, energy, built environment, medical and health to manufacturing. The potential benefits of Digital Twins for understanding, anticipating and influencing behaviours of real systems are underpinned by enabling technologies such as the Industrial Internet of Things and large scale data processing tools. At sector and national level, the benefits of linking Digital Twins for greater end‐user and societal benefit are further driving interest and leading to collaborations which should tackle technical, and non‐technical barriers and drive enabling policy changes. Such collaborations are drawing attention to non‐technical challenges that need to be overcome to embrace the potential benefits of the change and how they are inextricably linked to technical architecture choices and managed stakeholder relationships. Issues include, life‐cycle responsibilities for the Digital Twin, clarity of intellectual Property rights and risks, trust, privacy and ethics and the challenges of working with legacy assets, where any rights and contractual arrangements had not previously anticipated collaborative Digital Twins. In this paper, the specific challenges with Intellectual Property and Digital Twins is explored. In particular, illustrating the challenges through a generic Digital Twin and Rail Sector example, comparing with experience emerging in Digital Manufacture and outlining a potential approach to manage Intellectual Property risk using model based systems assurance methodologies, consistent with existing assurance
frameworks. The paper concludes with further work to develop and trial specific guidance.