The digital twin technology is one of Industry 4.0’s fastest emerging concepts. A digital twin is a virtual copy of a real-world object functioning in a simulated environment to test its functionality and performance.
Digital Twins facilitates in-depth studies by using big data, IoT, and AI frameworks. It is beneficial to identify significant obstacles, to reduce disruption, and to analyze business opportunities. It is also necessary to model future results and to customize growth based on consumer needs.
How do you build a Digital Twin?
There are three vital elements to form a digital twin:
- Historical Data: Past individual system performance records, aggregate processes, and basic structures.
- Present Data: Concrete data from equipment monitors, production sources of fields and equipment, and distribution chain systems outputs. Outputs from systems of other market segments can also be used, such as customer service and buying.
- Future Data: Machine learning along with inputs from engineering.
The advantages of Digital Twins include:
- Product Tracking: A digital twin keeps monitoring the product during the complete process. IoT sensors continue to offer time-to-time updates on the performance of the product. Digital Twin processes all the data, and the output is continually enhanced.
- Predictiveness: The digital twin makes it possible to predict the future state of relevant company assets using several modeling methods. It also helps to determine the consequences of any critical issues to be resolved.
- Better Team Coordination: System automation and 24-hour accessibility to information systems allow technicians to focus more on teamwork. It leads to improved productivity and operational success.
Use Cases of Digital Twin:
- Smart Cities
Digital Twin can dramatically improve ecologically, economically advanced towns. It enables users to create systems that guide their upcoming plans and help solve cities’ complex problems. In the event of disasters such as earthquakes, Digital Twin provides useful real-time information. It includes the areas harmed, which hospitals can be affected by, allowing local planners to take proactive action.
- Disaster Management
Climate change has had an impact on the planet in recent years. Digital twins will continue to counter this by intelligently developing smarter infrastructure, creating strategies for incident response, and monitoring the climate crisis.
- Healthcare
Digital Twin provides advantages in healthcare by updating the records and history of patient well-being. It’s easy for physicians to offer appropriate medication to their patients.
- Automotive Field
Digital Twins are utilized in the automotive industry to create the digital prototype of a connected vehicle. The technology is used before construction starts by automobile firms to design the ideal automotive vehicle. When the vehicle enters the streets, the model and analyzes the development process and possible issues.
- Future of Digital Twins
Digital twins will emerge in many industries as one of the leading IT tools, especially in manufacturing. But it will also revolutionize product development and product testing in a wide variety of fields. As long as it is somehow producing data that can be collected and analyzed. Almost any generated product will have its digital twin in the future. This idea is known as a ‘digital triplet .’ It will mark the digital twin’s next stage of evolution.
For instance, instead of Boeing having only one digital twin of a new aircraft for development purposes. For any aircraft it makes, the company would have a specific digital model. In real-time, these individual models can be fed information from linked sensors. And AI analysis can be applied to render real-time product life cycle predictions, predictive maintenance, etc. Human beings would also have their own digital triplets that gather real-time information from wearables. It can contain the specific genetic code of a person. And every individual on the planet will receive extremely individualized yet cost-effective medical care using this information in principle.
