Digital Twin Architectures for Intelligent Environmental Engineering Enterprises

Abstract

Environmental engineering organizations—encompassing municipal utilities, environmental consultancies, and regulatory agencies—are increasingly confronting the need to function as integrated, intelligent enterprises rather than collections of disciplinarily siloed technical and administrative functions. While prior research has examined digital twin applications within specific environmental engineering subdomains, including stormwater infrastructure management and workforce intelligence, and has separately surveyed digital twin technology across healthcare, environmental, and enterprise management domains, the architectural challenge of constructing comprehensive, enterprise-wide digital twin systems purpose-built for the distinctive organizational structure of environmental engineering enterprises remains insufficiently addressed in the existing literature. This paper presents a systematic architectural framework for enterprise-scale digital twin systems within environmental engineering organizations, proposing the Intelligent Environmental Enterprise Digital Twin (IEEDT) architecture as an integrative framework that unifies physical infrastructure digital twins, organizational process digital twins, and human capital digital twins within a coherent enterprise information systems architecture. We examine the integration of IEEDT architectures with Enterprise Resource Planning platforms, with particular attention to SAP-based implementations given that platform’s dominant market position within large environmental utility and engineering consultancy organizations, and articulate the specific technical, organizational, and data governance requirements for achieving genuine enterprise-wide digital twin integration rather than the fragmented, single-domain digital twin implementations that characterize current environmental engineering practice.