A digital twin is a digital representation of a physical asset reproducing its data model, its behaviour and its communication with other physical assets. Digital twins act as a digital replica for the physical object or process they represent, providing nearly real-time monitoring and evaluation without being in close proximity. Although most of their concrete applications can be found mainly in the industrial context, healthcare represents another relevant area where digital twins can have a disruptive impact. The main research question tackled by this paper is about the integration of digital twins with agents and Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) technologies in healthcare. After providing an overview of the application of digital twins in healthcare, in this paper, we discuss our vision about agent-based digital twins, and we present a first case study, about the application of agent-based digital twins to the management of severe traumas.

In recent years, digital twins have been pervading different application domains—from manufacturing to healthcare—as an approach for virtualising different kinds of physical entities (things, products, machines). The dominant view developed in the literature so far is about the virtualisation of individual physical assets in a closed-system perspective. In this article, we introduce and explore a broader perspective that we call Web of Digital Twins (WoDT), in which the digital twin paradigm is exploited for the pervasive softwarisation of possibly large-scale interrelated physical realities. A WoDT can be conceived as an open, distributed and dynamic ecosystem of connected digital twins, functioning as an interoperable service-oriented layer for applications running on top, especially smart applications and multiagent systems. The article introduces an abstract model and architecture aimed to capture key aspects of the idea not bound to any specific application domains or implementing technologies and discusses their adoption in engineering real-world systems. To this purpose, two concrete case studies are considered, in the context of healthcare and smart mobility. Finally, the article includes a discussion of a selected set of research directions.

Healthcare is a main domain where digital twins are being explored and applied. Following a healthcare 4.0 perspective, in this paper we discuss a vision in which digital twins are pervasively used to digitalize any strategic assets of a health organization. We start from introducing a specific real-world case study – concerning trauma management – and then we broaden the discussion identifying some main points and challenges of a wider vision.

The impressive development of wearable computing and augmented reality technologies which is occurring in recent years allows to devise ICT systems that can bring a disruptive innovation in how emergency medical operations take place. In this paper we describe first explorations in that direction, represented by a distributed collaborative system called SAFE (Smart Augmented Field for Emergency) for teams of rescuers and operators involved in a rescue mission. SAFE is based on the integration of wearable computing and augmented reality technologies with intelligent agents and multi-agent systems.