# Toward Sustainable Development: Exploring the Value and Benefits of Digital Twins
## 1 Introduction  
Sustainable development is development that \"meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs\" [1]. In general, this issue has received considerable attention from businesses, governments, and researchers over the last decades [2, 3, 4]. Not surprisingly, due to global warming and its effects [5], there is a clear and growing interest in developing and implementing low-impact solutions [6]. Among many key drivers for sustainability, an innovation is one of today's most desired technological traits to create more efficient and more sustainable products and services [7, 8]. According to [PERSON] et al. [9], Digital Twins are changing the face and pace of innovation, while the implications are profound, making an innovation faster, cheaper, and more radical.  
According to Fortune Business Insights, the global Digital Twin market size reached a value of US$6.75 billion in 2021 and is projected to reach US$96.49 billion by 2029, exhibiting a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 40.6% during the forecast period [10]. The world's largest tech companies, including Alphabet [11], Amazon [12], and Microsoft [13], offer development tools that enable the creation of Digital Twins of real-world systems in areas such as construction [14], healthcare [15], manufacturing [16], supply chain [17], andretail [18], to name a few. Moreover, Digital Twins and closely related areas have piqued the interest of researchers from over 158 countries (The number of countries has been estimated based on the results from the query \"digital twin\" execution on the Scopus database (30 March 2023)), spanning a wide range of fields, including engineering, computer science, physics, energy, biochemistry, decision sciences, and business management. Despite the numerous research questions raised and answered, a fundamental question still remains: what value and benefits can a Digital Twin deployment bring to the organization?  
In this paper, we aim to explore the value of a Digital Twin and identify its benefits, regardless of its domain of application. Thus, our study is qualitative in nature, providing an appropriate way to analyze a relatively under-examined topic. In other words, our study relies on exploring the state-of-the-art literature focused on Digital Twin development and implementation in any area of business or industry. In this sense, this paper contributes to the limited research in the Digital Twin landscape by identifying and articulating the story of its value and benefits, and informing interested parties of possible outcomes resulting from its adoption.  
The rest of the paper is structured as follows. In Section 2, we outline the theoretical and technological background that underpins the Digital Twin concept and architecture. In Section 3, we present the research methodology we applied to achieve our research objectives. In Section 4, we provide the results we obtained, followed by a discussion of threats to validity, as well as contributions, limitations, and future research directions in Section 5.