Exploring Digital Twin Technology: Definition and Key Benefits

Find out how a virtual copy of your product or service can help you optimize business processes.

These days, Industry 4.0 has the greatest impact on the technical improvement of the enterprise. Its characteristic features are the development of information and communication technologies, automation, and robotization of production processes. The integration of innovative solutions is relevant for all-sized businesses.

One of the most impressive technologies powering Industry 4.0 is Digital Twin. Next, we are going to discuss what exactly digital twin is and how it can boost businesses.

Digital Twin Fundamentals

According to 87% CEOs, digital twins are increasingly crucial to their company’s capacity to cooperate in strategic ecosystem alliances. What’s more, 65% of these same executives anticipate seeing their company boost its investment in digital twin solutions over the next three years.

In the modern context, industry-changing digital twins are exact copies of systems or machinery, only virtual. These are cutting-edge 3D software models, which mimic nearly every aspect of a physical twin. It can be a product, a process, or a service. To comprehend its condition, respond to changes, enhance operations, and provide value, digital twins rely on sensor data collected in real time. Such data includes analytics, event data, condition or status, and metadata.

To maximize the commercial prospects that these companies pursue, a virtual twin technology incorporates all data, models, and other information about a physical asset. So, the main idea behind this concept is predicting and fine-tuning performance using simulation- or data-based methods.

The digital twin solution is a virtual space, wherein you can test your ideas. However, a 3D digital twin can only be a major asset if it can make precise predictions. This means that a virtual twin is necessary for:

• Understanding and modeling the performance of an asset;
• Forecasting its behavior;
• Optimizing its use and maintenance practices.

Therefore, this smart business solution serves as a link between the real and virtual worlds. That’s why it’s worth creating a digital twin.

But first, let’s look at the digital twin components to understand how it functions:

• AI

To act quickly and efficiently on behalf of their real twin, digital twins should be provided with a controller, which is integrated with ontologies, machine learning, and deep learning methods.

• Unique identifiers

To connect with their physical twin, digital twins would need to have individual identifiers.

• Sensors & actuators

Real twins might be fitted with sensors, allowing digital twins to mimic their senses of sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. They employ actuators to accomplish this, depending on the demands of the application.

• Communication

Digital twins should be able to communicate with their surroundings. The Tactile Internet and 5G standards must be followed for communication to occur, including the tactile sense.

• Digital platform

The integrated service platform combines information about the system, software tools, and models into unified services for the physical and virtual shop floor.

• Representation

Based on various digital twin applications, they can be software components without a physical representation, or they could have a virtual representation as a 3D avatar, hologram, or even a humanoid social robot.

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• Privacy & security

Utilizing cutting-edge biometrics and encryption methods, as well as resolving legal and political difficulties, would be necessary to protect the identity and privacy of the physical twins.

What Are the most Powerful Benefits of Digital Twin?

Can you even imagine the idea of a single digital twin that can smoothly work across domain and system boundaries?

The benefits of digital twins, such an all-encompassing solution, are indisputable:

#1. Improved R&D

Digital twins produce a wealth of data regarding expected performance results. This facilitates more efficient product research and development. Thus, before production, businesses may use this data to get insights that will help them make necessary product improvements.

Also, digital twins are employed in product development to help developers foresee how a development cycle will turn out. They are also useful for monitoring production systems after a product has entered production. Digital twins can even help decide what to do next when a product is nearing the end of its existence and needs to undergo final processing.

#2. Accurate Insights

The creation of a digital twin system offers more thorough support for decision-making. This comes in handy for different activities through the assessment of current conditions, the diagnosis of past issues, and the forecast of future trends.

Situational awareness and real-time insights are provided by digital twins that are synced with physical entities and tailored to the particular issues to be solved. These insights are often more credible than traditional methods of searching for data across multiple corporate platforms. They raise the caliber of decisions based on that data. In addition to decision support, a digital twin’s structured information approach enables decision automation.

#3. Planned Maintenance

A virtual twin solution helps increase business productivity and efficiency, all while cutting costs and time. Despite having a strong desire to integrate digital twins into their everyday operations, a large part of small and medium-sized firms (SMEs) have no clue about the primary technologies and tools of this concept. Furthermore, because digital twins represent such a complicated system, they must be oriented, run, as well as optimized over an extended period.

#4. Optimized Workflows

Digital twins can efficiently monitor, detect, predict, and optimize a physical asset along with collecting sensory data, AI, and big data analytics. By introducing new business strategies or enhancing efficiency through digitization, virtual twins can impact digital transformation for companies.

Alternatively, digital twins can monetize and apply real-time information to alter the business model of an organization. This is why companies start exploring methods to commercialize and optimize these new digital assets as they become more experienced with exploiting digital twins.

Conclusion

The growing popularity of digital twins is easily explained by its benefits for businesses. Thanks to digital twins, organizations get situational awareness and understanding in real-time, optimize work processes, and effectively plan maintenance.

The modern creation and implementation of a digital twin help enterprises to take leading positions in the market in the future.

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Originally published at https://www.visartech.com