Digital Thread
The digital thread is the connected flow of data about a product or asset across its whole lifecycle — design, manufacture, operation and maintenance — so information follows the asset and every stage can draw on the others.
Where a digital twin is a model of one asset, the digital thread is the connective data backbone linking systems and lifecycle stages, so that, for example, a maintenance finding can feed back to design, or as-built data is available to operations. It underpins traceability, faster engineering changes and better decisions, and is a foundational concept in Industry 4.0 data strategy.
Related reading
- Digital twins in industry
- Cognite Data Fusion
- AVEVA Predictive Analytics
- Digital Twin
- Industry 4.0
- Industrial IoT (IIoT)
Related terms
Digital Twin · Industry 4.0 · Industrial IoT (IIoT) · Process Historian · Bottleneck · EAM (Enterprise Asset Management) · Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)