Can Digital Twins Change Our World?

At the close of 2020, Siemens announced it was developing augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) to digital twins that would bring simulation benefits to industrial automation as a way to help manufacturers maintain optimal production levels without sacrificing employee safety during Covid-19.

On January 25, 2021, FedScoop reported that the United States Air Force, through its Advanced Battle Management System (ABMS), was building digital twins of its weapons systems, opening the door to an Internet of things (IoT) for war.

In the business of high-tech sports, on March 6 - 15, 2021, the 36th America’s Cup is scheduled to begin showcasing the technologically engineered AC75 mono-hull.

Jacomo Corbo, Co-founder and Chief Scientist of QuantumBlack, a McKinsey company, said that ahead of America’s Cup sailing race, McKinsey built a digital twin to replicate the elite sailors of the defending champions, Emirates Team New Zealand.

“Prior to the development of the digital twin, testing new boat designs required the team’s sailors to perform test runs in a simulator, which was inefficient and costly,” said Corbo. “McKinsey’s digital twin outperforms the sailors using the same simulator, speeding up testing and the rate at which designs are optimized by a factor of nearly ten.”

“Given the inherently dynamic environment of sailing, McKinsey’s digital twin represents one of the most ambitious and complex applications of deep reinforcement learning ever,” added Corbo.

From smart cities to high-tech sports to smart cities and manufacturing, digital twins allow companies to optimize processes or products without risk.

According to Faustino Gomez, Co-founder and CEO of Nnaisense, a Swiss company with an undisclosed Series B round, said that digital twins are used to mirror the physical world in the cyber world.

“This has obvious advantages such as being able to test settings virtually and also run optimizations without having to do so in a real-world product or process which could be dangerous, costly, and frequently simply not practical,” said Gomez.

Smart cities and sustainable buildings

ABI Research’s new quarterly update, Smart Cities and Smart Spaces, report they anticipate the number of urban digital twins surpass 500 by 2025, with implementations expanding beyond pilots to widespread multi-purpose deployments.

Josh Adams, Chief Strategy Officer at Animated Insights says digital twins are the foundation of all future services and solutions within buildings.

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