Digital twins are poised to transform manufacturing processes and offer new ways to reduce costs, monitor assets, optimize maintenance, reduce downtime and enable the creation of connected products. The digital twin model, although not new, is entering manufacturing and other industries fast. IoT is one of the drivers. Digital twins in an industrial, non-academical, context.
When you start hooking up IoT endpoints, devices and physical assets to data sensing and gathering systems which are turned into insights and ultimately into optimized/automated processes and business outcomes, as we do with the Industrial Internet of Things (among other things), there are quite some new possibilities that arise, to say the least.
A digital twin is a living model that drives a business outcome (Colin J. Parris, GE)
Even if we’re only really still seeing the tip of the possibility iceberg, sometimes it requires a bit of imagination to understand these opportunities. Digital twins are a perfect example of this and key in the Industry 4.0 vision and the Industrial Internet. Digital twins are definitely poised to deliver upon their many promises in manufacturing and beyond. A clear token of that is the growing support of digital twin use cases in Industrial IoT platforms.
We all have grown used to the concept and practice of digitization: books turned into e-books, paper information turned into electronic formats and digital processes, music in bits and bytes, the list goes on. We start to understand the opposite as well, for instance with 3D-printing. Digital twins are again something different. They are digital (software) copies of a physical asset. That’s the really simple definition. Let’s take a deeper look.
Digital twins made tangible: the bike example
At the edition 2015 of LiveWorx, the event of one the industrial IoT leaders, PTC, the company’s EVP CAD, Michael M. Campbell, explained the whole idea in easy terms, using the set-up PTC had constructed using a bike as you can see in the video on YouTube.
In a nutshell: the bike shows several technologies at work in the digital replication example. First the bike gets equipped with the necessary technologies and connected, making it ‘smart’ as we call that nowadays. The resulting information gets leveraged in a dashboard, in this case PTC’s ThingWorx of course, and then into that digital twin. The last step is leveraging the information in an augmented reality context.
Among the benefits: visibility into how the product is used in the real world and how it performs which in turn leads to goals such as product optimization, potentially insights for new products or versions, an improved and if feasible predictive service capability and so on.
In other words: data leveraged into intelligence into action in the crossing of digital and physical worlds. Of course, this is just a showcase video with some of the benefits in the scope of a specific product. You can imagine what happens if you have a digital twin of a wind turbine or a spacecraft to name just two. This doesn’t mean that the benefits (of which we only listed a few based on the video) or the products only concern big industrial assets and products. Just as the decreasing cost of technologies accelerated the evolutions in IoT – and thus in digital twin technology – in coming years the same decreasing costs and business cases in an ever smarter product environment will certainly expand to more and more products. And that might just happen sooner than we think.
Credit:https://www.i-scoop.eu/internet-of-things-guide/industrial-internet-things-iiot-saving-costs-innovation/digital-twins/
