Involving before Evolving: A Vision for Trustworthy Enterprise Digital Twin Engineering

Abstract:Enterprise Digital Twins (EDTs) promise data-driven decision support at organizational scale, but realizing them requires navigating siloed departments, tacit knowledge, and high-stakes decisions with long-horizon consequences. Existing approaches involve domain experts during model development but focus less on early organizational buy-in in EDTs. We present a vision for trustworthy EDT engineering grounded in an `involving before evolving' paradigm: rapidly involving stakeholders through a working prototype before evolving toward federation and full interoperability. Our three-stage approach combines foundation models for rapid prototyping, an ontological backbone for federated interoperability, and observability tooling for stakeholder trust. We ground our vision in an ongoing collaboration with Michelin, a multinational manufacturer, where an initial prototype has helped support stakeholder buy-in.

Accepted for publication at MODELS Companion 2026 (Málaga, Spain). 5 pages (4 pages + 1 page references)

Software Engineering (cs.SE); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC)

arXiv:2609.13071 [cs.SE]

(or arXiv:2609.13071v1 [cs.SE] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.13071 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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