How can digital twins benefit modern industry ?

We hear of the term digital twins quite frequently these days. These days it means high capability simulation models with extremely powerful visualisation capabilities. Digital twins are used for monitoring the real world virtually.

A digital twin is a digital replica of a living or non-living physical entity. Digital twin refers to a digital replica of potential and actual physical assets (physical twin), processes, people, places, systems and devices that can be used for various purposes. - wikipedia 

Digital twins are usually considered for highly safe and secure processes like an aircraft engine in flight. Rolls Royce from UK deploys a “digital twin” – a complete, life-size virtual copy of a physical Rolls-Royce engine, at its labs in Derby. A Trent aircraft engine has a digital twin on which what if analysis is carried out to identify and eliminate possible threats and risks from parts failure. This digital twin of the actual engine which is in flight, takes into account and visualises the stress, strain on body parts by clocking the hours of flight and highlights possible failure of parts, early enough warranting replacement or service, avoiding major accidents.  ..

Just thirty years back, computer simulation was a very fancy word, done only for expensive parts, buildings etc. The hardware and software for such experiments were very costly for the average industry and common man.  When I did higher studies in Industrial Engineering back in mid 80s, the digital computer simulation exercises, besides the analog computing exercises that we had to do, were done on PC/XT, PC/AT and Intel Pentium 33 MHz machines. Gone are the days now, we have very powerful phones that work on faster processors at speeds thousand times faster than those days, just thirty years back.

The Samsung M30S phablet (phone and tablet) gives me the comfort of a smartphone and at the same time, the richness of experience of Internet browsing on a very optimised screen area (screen ratio > 91%) with high resolution text and image reproduction. Working on the Exynos 9611 (4 core/2.3 GHz and 4 core/1.7 Ghz processor) with upto 16 GHz max processing speed. (click here..) It will be a treat to play high end graphics games on these phablets, as they give both speed and the concenience of a large screen for the players to manipulate their actions.

 The tools of today can be used to do large volume 3D modeling and high quality graphics visualisation using the present tools with the common man. What this tells us is that the coming days we can expect great many areas being pervaded by the digital twin concept to effect in performance and efficiency improvement, also in improving safety and identifying and reducing wastes.

Graphical simulation and visualisation tools have been extensively used in Operations Planning and design, Process Improvement, Design and Manufacturing collaboration, training and communications and marketing exercises. Click here for an HBR doc from Oct '20, explaining how computer simulations these days are getting better and affordable.

Digital twins are here to stay for improving safety, predicting and reducing failure, thus saving lives and reducing costs.

George.