--- id: articles/history-of-the-digital-twin about: label: A short history of the digital twin description: >- Where the idea and the name came from: Apollo's simulators, Gelernter's Mirror Worlds, Grieves and NASA, and the step from spacecraft and factories to cities and the built environment. tags: - history - digital twin - mirror world - NASA - product lifecycle management - national digital twin - city article: {} domains: - places relations: - predicate: about target: terms/digital-twin - predicate: cites target: media/mirror-worlds provenance: origin: agent sources: - title: >- Digital Twins and Living Models at NASA (B. Danette Allen, keynote, ASME Digital Twin Summit, 3 November 2021; NASA Technical Reports Server record with abstract) url: 'https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20210023699' - title: >- Mirror Worlds (David Gelernter, Oxford University Press, 1991; Crossref record with the publisher's abstract) url: 'https://api.crossref.org/works/10.1093/oso/9780195068122.001.0001' - title: >- Helsinki Arena 2000 - Augmenting a Real City to a Virtual One (Linturi, Koivunen and Sulkanen, in Digital Cities, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, 2000; Crossref record) url: 'https://api.crossref.org/works/10.1007/3-540-46422-0_8' - title: >- Digital city Kyoto (Toru Ishida, Communications of the ACM 45 (7), July 2002; Crossref record) url: 'https://api.crossref.org/works/10.1145/514236.514238' - title: >- Digital Twin: Manufacturing Excellence through Virtual Factory Replication (a white paper by Dr. Michael Grieves, 2014) url: >- https://www.3ds.com/fileadmin/PRODUCTS-SERVICES/DELMIA/PDF/Whitepaper/DELMIA-APRISO-Digital-Twin-Whitepaper.pdf - title: >- Virtually Perfect (Michael Grieves, Space Coast Press, 2011; Open Library record) url: 'https://openlibrary.org/works/OL20422263W' - title: >- DRAFT Modeling, Simulation, Information Technology & Processing Roadmap, Technology Area 11 (NASA, November 2010; Internet Archive copy of nasa.gov) url: >- https://web.archive.org/web/20101208235448/http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/501321main_TA11-MSITP-DRAFT-Nov2010-A1.pdf - title: >- Modeling, Simulation, Information Technology & Processing Roadmap, Technology Area 11 (NASA, April 2012; Internet Archive copy of nasa.gov) url: >- https://web.archive.org/web/20120927141027/http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/501321main_TA11-ID_rev4_NRC-wTASR.pdf - title: >- The Digital Twin Paradigm for Future NASA and U.S. Air Force Vehicles (Edward H. Glaessgen and D. S. Stargel, 53rd AIAA/ASME/ASCE/AHS/ASC Structures, Structural Dynamics and Materials Conference, April 2012) url: 'https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20120008178' - title: >- Digital Twin: Mitigating Unpredictable, Undesirable Emergent Behavior in Complex Systems (Michael Grieves and John Vickers, in Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Complex Systems, Springer; Crossref record) url: 'https://api.crossref.org/works/10.1007/978-3-319-38756-7_4' - title: >- The Gemini Principles (Bolton, Enzer, Schooling et al., Centre for Digital Built Britain and Digital Framework Task Group, 2018) url: >- https://www.cdbb.cam.ac.uk/system/files/documents/TheGeminiPrinciples.pdf - title: >- Digital Twins at the City and Town Scale: Europe and Beyond (Gaffney, Croucher et al., Internet Archaeology 70, 2025) url: 'https://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue70/5/index.html' - title: >- How to tell the difference between a model and a digital twin (Louise Wright and Stuart Davidson, Advanced Modeling and Simulation in Engineering Sciences 7, 2020; Crossref record with abstract) url: 'https://api.crossref.org/works/10.1186/s40323-020-00147-4' created: '2026-10-23' reviewed: '2026-10-23' reviewed_by: >- Claude, from the sources listed; Wikipedia's article used only to find them. Read in full: the 2010 and 2012 NASA roadmaps, Glaessgen and Stargel's paper, Grieves' 2014 white paper and the Gemini Principles. Read as abstracts or catalogue records only: Allen's keynote, Mirror Worlds, Helsinki Arena 2000, Digital City Kyoto, Virtually Perfect, Grieves and Vickers' chapter, the Internet Archaeology paper and Wright and Davidson; the ACM and Springer pages refused the request status: draft --- The idea of a running copy of a real thing, kept up to date with what happens to the original, is older than its name. A 2021 NASA keynote by B. Danette Allen says the idea was born at NASA in the 1960s, as a "living model" of the Apollo mission.[^1] After the oxygen tank explosion on Apollo 13, NASA used several simulators to work out what had failed, and extended a physical model of the vehicle with digital parts.[^1] The idea had been imagined for places before it had its name. In Mirror Worlds, published in 1991, the Yale computer scientist David Gelernter imagined looking at a screen and seeing an image of your city with its traffic moving.[^2] Or the screen might show the state of a whole company at this second.[^2] Any citizen could look in, for example to explore how the local schools were doing.[^2] The book also explains how such a program could be built with the technology of the day.[^2] The wiki has an entry on the book: [Mirror Worlds](/media/mirror-worlds/). Two accounts of virtual cities date from around 2000. A chapter by Risto Linturi, Marja-Riitta Koivunen and Jari Sulkanen in the 2000 Springer collection Digital Cities is titled "Helsinki Arena 2000 - Augmenting a Real City to a Virtual One".[^3] In 2002 Toru Ishida wrote an article titled "Digital city Kyoto" in Communications of the ACM.[^4] The name came from manufacturing and aerospace. Michael Grieves writes that he introduced the concept of a virtual, digital equivalent to a physical product in 2003, in his University of Michigan executive course on product lifecycle management.[^5] His model had three parts.[^5] There is the physical product in real space and the virtual product in virtual space, and there are the links of data and information that tie the two together.[^5] He writes that he introduced the term "Digital Twin" in his book Virtually Perfect, and that he attributed it to John Vickers of NASA, with whom he works.[^5] Open Library dates that book to 2011.[^6] At NASA the term appears in a November 2010 draft roadmap for modelling, simulation, information technology and processing, written by a team chaired by Mike Shafto.[^7] It defines a NASA digital twin as a simulation of a vehicle or system that combines physical models, sensor updates and fleet history "to mirror the life of its flying twin".[^7] The roadmap lists four uses.[^7] They are flying a mission in simulation before launch, following the real flight as it happens, diagnosing the cause of a serious fault or damage, and studying changes to the mission that were not considered when the vehicle was designed.[^7] The April 2012 version of the roadmap keeps the same definition.[^8] Also in April 2012, Edward Glaessgen of NASA and D. S. Stargel of the Air Force Office of Scientific Research presented a paper on the digital twin to a structures conference in Honolulu, in a session given over to the subject.[^9] Their definition speaks of an "as-built" vehicle: the twin models the vehicle as it was made, including its defects and fabrication anomalies.[^9] A footnote says the paradigm was originally conceived by the Defense Sciences Office at DARPA.[^9] They list the NASA roadmap among their references.[^9] Grieves and Vickers later wrote a chapter on the digital twin and unpredictable, undesirable emergent behaviour in complex systems, which Springer published in 2016.[^10] In Britain in 2018, the Centre for Digital Built Britain and the Digital Framework Task Group published the Gemini Principles, named after the Latin for twins.[^11] The paper is about the built environment and its infrastructure.[^11] It defined a digital twin as "a realistic digital representation of assets, processes or systems in the built or natural environment".[^11] It said that what sets a twin apart from other models is its connection to the physical thing it twins.[^11] It also proposed a national digital twin.[^11] This would not be one huge model of the entire built environment.[^11] It would be many twins, each kept by the owner of the assets it models, joined by securely shared data only where that delivers value.[^11] One of its examples is a new wastewater treatment plant.[^11] By bringing together the twins of the water, energy and transport sectors, its effect on power demand and on traffic on local roads could be modelled.[^11] The paper notes that NASA had run complex simulations of spacecraft for decades.[^11] City-scale twins now include heritage work. In 2025 a team from the University of Bradford, with co-authors from the city council and elsewhere, described Virtual Bradford.[^12] They built it in partnership with the council and call it one of the first open-data city-scale twins at that level of detail.[^12] It covers the city centre, including several conservation areas and multiple listed buildings.[^12] The term is still used loosely. A 2020 paper by Louise Wright and Stuart Davidson says it is applied in many different ways, often without saying how a twin differs from a model.[^13] They describe the basic parts of a twin as essentially a model and some data.[^13] This wiki uses the phrase in that broad sense, for models and simulations of places; see [What is a digital twin?](/terms/digital-twin/).