Digital Twins are of paramount relevance in the Industry 4.0 framework. However, the idea of Digital Twin has many different interpretations. These are tied to the intended use of a Digital Twin, thus to the viewpoint of the involved professionals (process designers, control specialists, managers, and so on). The said interpretations are often highly incompatible with one another, since they can involve as heterogeneous entities as a CAD drawing and a neural network. A convergence of Digital Twin interpretations is desirable, to take full profit of the contained knowledge. In this research we argue that this desired convergence cannot be found at the same abstraction level of the available Digital Twin interpretations, and calls for a higher one. We consequently propose a paradigm – that we name Digital Multiverse – to comprehend the major Digital Twin interpretations not only in the sense of data integration, which is the goal of promising complementary ideas like that of Asset Administration Shell, but also by establishing and enforcing consistency rules that involve both data and models. We also show some examples to support the usefulness and viability of our proposal.

数字孪生在工业 4.0 框架中至关重要。然而，数字孪生的想法有许多不同的解释。这些与数字孪生的预期用途相关，因此与相关专业人员（流程设计师、控制专家、经理等）的观点相关。所述解释通常彼此高度不兼容，因为它们可能涉及像 CAD 绘图和神经网络这样的异构实体。数字孪生解释的融合是可取的，以充分利用所包含的知识。在这项研究中，我们认为在可用的数字孪生解释的相同抽象级别上无法找到这种期望的收敛，并且需要更高的解释。因此，我们提出了一个范式——我们称之为数字多元宇宙——不仅在数据集成的意义上理解主要的数字孪生解释，这是有希望的补充思想的目标，如资产管理壳，而且通过建立和强制执行一致性涉及数据和模型的规则。我们还展示了一些例子来支持我们的提案的实用性和可行性。