Digital Twins as Key Technology in Industry 4.0

Technological inventions are combinations of an intellectual past with socia-economic and functional future. Production is constantly improved thanks to advances in technology and technological innovations and there have been three major revolutions in this development process. The technologies underlying these revolutions have taken the task of catalyst in progress of production. When the progress in technology has accelerated, it was caused technological pressures in production field and it has led to revolutions in these pressure. New technologies, such as cyber-physical systems, cloud technologies, the internet of things, autonomous systems, big data, virtual reality and 3D printer technologies have also become the elements of pressure that they have led to an industrial revolution. Each of these technologies has devoloped independently and have different application areas but thanks to synergy obtained when used together, they achieved to move production from traditional structure to smarter production level. Physical factories which were firstly became digitized and than secondly virtualized, turned into "smart factories" with this synergy. Starting at the idea stage of a physical product and based on the idea of obtaining a virtual copy with real-time data throughout the life of the product, the Digital Twins managed to become a key technology that brings out synergy by using the technologies mentioned in the realization of smart factories. The purpose of this article is contribute to the literature to understand the place, importance and future potential of the Digital Twin concept in smart production systems and processes and also develop a reference point in the context of Industry