Michael Grieves

American product lifecycle management expert who introduced the idea of a digital twin of a physical product and later gave it its name in a book.

Michael Grieves works on product lifecycle management (PLM), the handling of a product's information from design to retirement.¹ After a degree in computer engineering at Michigan State he took an MBA at Oakland University and then a doctorate at Case Western Reserve.¹ He is executive director of the Digital Twin Institute, and was chief scientist of advanced manufacturing at the Florida Institute of Technology.^1,3 AIAA's profile says he has consulted or done research for NASA, Boeing, Unilever, Newport News Shipbuilding and General Motors.³

In his 2014 white paper he writes that he introduced the concept of a virtual, digital equivalent of a physical product in 2003, in his University of Michigan executive course on PLM.² The name Digital Twin came later, in his book Virtually Perfect; he attributes it to John Vickers of NASA, a colleague.² In his model the physical product sits in real space and the virtual product in virtual space, tied together by links of data and information.² With Vickers he later wrote a chapter on the digital twin and unpredictable, undesirable emergent behaviour in complex systems.¹

The wiki's history of the digital twin gives his account of where the term came from.