Toward Intelligent AIoT: A Comprehensive Survey on Digital Twin and Multimodal Generative AI Integration

Abstract

The Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) is rapidly evolving from basic connectivity to intelligent perception, reasoning, and decision making across domains such as healthcare, manufacturing, transportation, and smart cities. Multimodal generative AI (GAI) and digital twins (DTs) provide complementary solutions. DTs deliver high-fidelity virtual replicas for real-time monitoring, simulation, and optimization with GAI enhancing cognition, cross-modal understanding, and the generation of synthetic data. This survey presents a comprehensive overview of DT–GAI integration in the AIoT. We review the foundations of DTs and multimodal GAI and highlight their complementary roles. We further introduce the Sense–Map–Generate–Act (SMGA) framework, illustrating their interaction through the SMGA loop. We discuss key enabling technologies, including multimodal data fusion, dynamic DT evolution, and cloud–edge–end collaboration. Representative application scenarios, including smart manufacturing, smart cities, autonomous driving, and healthcare, are examined to demonstrate their practical impact. Finally, we outline open challenges, including efficiency, reliability, privacy, and standardization, and we provide directions for future research toward sustainable, trustworthy, and intelligent AIoT systems.

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