Methodology for Prognostic Effectiveness Evaluating of Digital Twins Implementation as an Example of the Railway Traffic Management Task

As part of the development of the technological concept of industry 4.0, of considerable interest is the issue of predicting the economic and business effect that a particular company may receive from the digital twin’s implementation in the management circuit of its key business processes. Currently, there is no widely accepted methodology for obtaining a predictive estimate of this type. The way to create such methodology, which is based on predictive estimates of the relative effect of the implementation of digital twins on a set of formal metrics, looks promising. The current configuration of business processes is used as the base. This paper proposes a transparent methodology of the mentioned type, which is designed to obtain a predictive estimate of the quantitative type for the value of the economic and business effect that a company will receive after the digital twin’s concept implementation. This assessment has a transparent interpretation and is quite naturally associated with a group of metrics that are commonly used to evaluate the company performance. For example, the metrics that a company uses within the Balanced Scorecard framework can be used as a group of such metrics. It also proposed an original composition of digital twins, designed for the railway traffic management. On the example of this digital twin composition step by step demonstrated the mechanism of using the proposed predictive methodology to quantify the value of the economic effect that a railway company will receive from the digital twin’s implementation. The methodology proposed in the article to obtain a predictive estimate of the digital twins implementation economic effect is quite transparent and simple. Therefore, it can be used in the practice of financial planning without much difficulty.