Digital Twin technology is much more than representation of 3 dimensional view. This can produce value when augmented with real time data collected from IoT devices and analysed with Machine Learning/ AI techniques. As the data is expanding exponentially with billion devices getting connected where sensors are providing reliable data on real time basis; Digital Twin technology are coming handy in analysing and assessing products, services and processes for efficiency, better maintenance, and bringing many other benefits. Since the data continues to flow, simulations made by the digital twins can learn, improve, get continuously updated on near real time basis and models can be deployed in the physical world very quickly.
This is a promising technology with a time to acceptance of 5 to 10 years as featured in Gartner’s hype cycle for emerging technology trends for 2017 (Gartner, 2017). Market forecast is to have one-half of companies using Digital Twins to improve their products, services, and to solve real life challenges like traffic management, climate changes among others in next five years or so.
What is a Digital Twin?
Digital twin is a digital representation of a physical entity or system. The object can be an actual physical assets like building or can be a product like vehicle or a city by itself. These virtual replica gives control over the product or process from the design phase to the deployment phase, hence we will see a growing demand of digital twin technology globally. Digital Twin is getting widely adopted due to multiple benefits it offers, such as real-time monitoring, reduce product defects, shorten time to the market, extend the life of assets and reduction in production cost.
Why Digital Twin technology is important?
Digital twins are powerful masterminds to drive innovation and performance. Digital twin technology helps companies improve the customer experience by better understanding customer needs, develop enhancements to existing products, operations, and services, and can even help drive the innovation of new business.
Digital twins are virtual replicas of physical devices that data scientists and IT pros can use to run simulations before actual devices are built and deployed. They are also changing how technologies such as IoT, AI and analytics are optimized. Digital twins can marry human and AI to produce something far greater and simulate complex systemswhich wasn’t possible otherwise. Also combined with AR, VR and related technologies provide a framework to overlay intelligent decision making into day-to-day operations. Digital twins offer a real-time look at what’s happening with physical assets, which can radically alleviate maintenance burdens.
Where Digital Twin technology can be used?
Electronics & Manufacturing Industry are expected to b ethe largest users of this technology. But increasingly Digital Twin technology is used in government, Automotive, Energy and Utilities, Retail, Healthcare and many other industries. The applications range from Product Design & Development, Inventory Management, Manufacturing Process & Planning, city Planning, Traffic managements and others.
Retail Industry: During the pandemic retail industry was one of the most affected business next to travel and hospitality. Consumer experience is critical in the retail industry and Digital twin implementation played a crucial role in augmenting customer experience by creating virtual twins for customers and modelling fashions for them on it. Other benefits of Digital Twins are in the area of floor space management, security features implementation and energy management among others.
Smart Cities: Creating a replica of the physical world Digital Twin is rapidly becoming indispensable technology to visualize the city in real-time; layered with buildings data, urban infrastructure, utilities network, traffic data and others helped city authority to take real time decisions while planning new and making adjustments to existing conditions.
Tourism: Many nations have started using Digital Twin as a tool to promote their cities to attract tourists by creating high-quality 3D models supplemented with Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality applications. This virtual tourism also got a boost during COVID-19 pandemic with limited travel options for tourists.
Industry 4.0: Digital twin technology applied to in-use products provide comprehensive insights into usage patterns, workload capacity; a holistic view of the health and performance of equipment enable companies to carry out Maintenance and replenishment of spare parts to minimize time-to-service and avoid costly asset failures.
Manufacturing: Usage pattern and use feedback are incorporated into product designing where Digital twin has a significant influence simulating the next generation of products and aligning them to manufacturing pipeline.
Healthcare: Digital twin technology can be used for pre-operative planning by simulating the medical conditions, taking all medical risks into account and plan for better outcome. In addition to simulating process flows to identify inefficiencies and bottlenecks.
Current challenges for adoption
Three Dimensional drawings are the foundation of Digital twin. Most of the industries are still working on two Dimensional drawings currently and adoption of Digitization is the biggest bottleneck. As number of digital Twins increases; version control and storing the up-to date replica of physical assets in digital format can be being considered as a challenge to address. Finally, as massive amounts of data being collected and utilized in Digital Twin initiatives, it has potential risk for Data security and privacy which needs to be addressed carefully and responsibly.
References: – Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends (2017). Link: https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/gartners-top-10-technology-trends-2017/
