Demystifying digital X

Abstract

The rapid pace of development in Digital Engineering has led to an explosion of ideas and new practice in how it can support Engineering Design and Manufacture. You may have heard of the terms Digital Transformation, Digital Twin, Digital Thread, Digital Tapestry and Digital Footprint amongst many other forms of ``Digital X'' but how have these come about and how do they come together to provide the landscape of what Digitalisation has to offer? In this paper, we analyse the emergence, definition, use and co-occurrence of ``Digital X'' terminology from an academic dataset of 19,627 papers curated from Scopus. The results reveal that these terms are being used without being fully contextualised in terms of a hierarchy or equivalent to effectively articulate the Digital landscape. Through this analysis, an emerging ``Digital X'' framework is proposed, with evidence given to support suggested links, and knowledge gaps highlighted for further investigation. Once this framework is complete, a rich lexicon describing the Digital Landscape will pave the way for the future in Digital Engineering.