# Sustainability Requirements of Digital Twin-Based Systems: A Meta Systematic Literature Review
###### Abstract  
Sustainable development was defined by the UN in 1987 as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs, and this is a core concept in this paper. This work acknowledges the three dimensions of sustainability, i.e., economic, social, and environmental, but its focus is on this last one. A digital twin (DT) is frequently described as a physical entity with a virtual counterpart, and the data, connections between the two, implying the existence of connectors and blocks for efficient and effective data communication. This paper provides a meta systematic literature review (SLR) (i.e., an SLR of SLRs) regarding the sustainability requirements of DT-based systems. Numerous papers on the subject of DT were also selected because they cited the analyzed SLRs and were considered relevant to the purposes of this research. From the selection and analysis of 29 papers, several limitations and challenges were identified: the perceived benefits of DTs are not clearly understood; DTs across the product life cycle or the DT life cycle are not sufficiently studied; it is not clear how DTs can contribute to reducing costs or supporting decision-making; technical implementation of DTs must be improved and better integrated in the context of the IoT; the level of fidelity of DTs is not entirely evaluated in terms of their parameters, accuracy, and level of abstraction; and the ownership of data stored within DTs should be better understood. Furthermore, from our research, it was not possible to find a paper discussing DTs only in regard to environmental sustainability. digital twins (DTs); Internet of Things (IoT); sustainability requirements; sustainable development; product design +
Footnote †: journal: Applied Sciences  
buildings, or even human bodies and human organs. However, the focus of this paper is on DTs as they represent physical assets. Other reported usages of building DTs are for cybersecurity incident prediction [3], monitoring ergonomics in IoT contexts [5], online education [6], or optimization farming systems [7]. Product design is also a fundamental and related aspect of DTs and environmental sustainability because it is a discipline that deals with many complex decisions and cross-cutting concerns, such as safety, security, usability, or sustainability (including the choice of materials or the use of energy). Furthermore, product design may influence the planning of a production line, another frequent application of DTs [1; 2; 8]. This means that errors and failures can be predicted and managed with the help of DT approaches, using data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine-learning techniques. Sustainable development is defined by the UN (1987), in the Brundtland Report (\"Our Common Future\") [9], as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. This framework is very useful, as the concept of a circular economy (CE) [10], defined as an economic model to minimize the consumption of finite resources, is becoming more important and is closely related to the concept of the supply chain [11]. Industry 4.0 was introduced in 2011, and it has become synonymous with smart manufacturing/factory, corresponding to established concepts such as computer-integrated manufacturing, a flexible manufacturing system [10], CE, and all together, the management of a huge amount of data generated by DTs [12], allowing the integration of new tools such as those related to the Internet of Things (IoT). Closely linked to product design optimization and CE is the concept of sustainable product design, defined by [PERSON] [13] as the art of designing buildings, cities, and other artifacts so that they meet the objectives of sustainable development. Product design is not just art, it is also in the decision of what materials to use, choosing in such a way that a product is useful for society.