An expert evaluation of a Qt based digital twin interface

Abstract

The popularity of the concept of a Digital Twin has been on the rise, partly because of the rise of Industry 4.0. Many areas, such as the aerospace industry, manufacturing industry, health care and transportation, are interested in the concept of Digital Twins. The interest has emerged because of the claimed benefits such as increased productivity, reduced production costs, sustainability enhancements, and reduction of environmental impacts. Some of the core technologies of the Industry 4.0 are, as well, important to Digital Twins.

In this project, a graphical user interface (GUI) software is developed to enable the user to start creating their own Digital Twin (DT) environments. The software includes a flexible custom Qt Modeling Language (QML) plugin that can be included in any Qt Quick application to enable sharing the data.

The software is presented to four experts, after which they have to answer a questionnaire consisting of questions about the presented software as well as DTs in general. The answers to the questionnaire are analyzed thematically and the results are confirmed via an agreement testing between two observers with Cohen's Kappa. The code of the software was analyzed statically, without running the code, with Axivion Suite, which is a static code analysis tool. This analysis provides some feedback about the quality of the code.

The answers to the questionnaire show the experts' perspective regarding DTs as well as their perspectives on the future of DTs. These results may be useful to future developers and researchers of DTs.