Digital Twin Prototypes and Models
The #digitaltwin prototype is created before the physical twin and the digital twin model is used to define a type of entity or process.
What is a Prototype?
The digital twin prototype is typically comprised of engineering designs, processes, relevant analysis, and a visual representation to create the physical product or process. As you might imagine, it’s faster and cheaper to create and test a digital product than a physical one. Digital mistakes and iterations are definitely less costly or painful.
Models let you Define Once and Reuse Many
The digital twin model allows you define all aspects of a type of entity just once, rather than defining it repeatedly for each individual entity in your IoT platform. The model includes baseline information including a name, description, a variety of properties, one or more pictures or CAD models, and a version number because the model may evolve over its lifetime. If you’re on object oriented software developer, you can think of this as a base class comprised of one or more properties. Unique, individual entities are referred to as digital twin instances which I’ll cover in a later article. Each instance of a digital twin derived from a digital twin model will inherit its properties. You can best think of a digital twin model as a data definition, structured in a database or file. A composable digital twin model is created using a visual designer in an application or through a domain-specific programming language designed to create the proper data model. An example of a digital twin model might be a 2022 Ford F-150 with a specific set of features as properties. Thousands of actual 2022 Ford F-150s on the road that inherit the specific feature set from the model would be the digital twin instances.
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More to Come
Follow along with me as I take you on a deep dive of all the elements that come together to make a digital twin. Click links below to catch up with other articles in the series:
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I help consultants, real estate agents and salespeople showcase their expertise, grow their reach, and lead their markets with innovative technology. DM me to check it out | WSJ Bestselling Author
3 年Thank you so much for this comprehensive and educational explanation, Rob! It seems like the usage of digital twin prototypes and models will be rising in the coming year as it would be less time consuming, and less costly. A lot of companies would definitely prefer reusing a digital representation of their products for testing purposes.
Construction: Decarbonised, digitized, hyper-connected and autonomous
3 年Great idea for a post. Looking forward to read about the other elements of what digital twins can do or get used for.
How to make digital twins interoperable | Bosch | Board IDTA | Catena-X | DPP
3 年In the specification of the Asset Administration Shell, the interoperable digital twin of Plattform Industrie 4.0, we speak of type asset and instance assets (asset kind). Both are represented by a digital twin and interrelated. However, a twin for an instance asset does not only implicitly inherit the properties of the type asset, it has additional aspects to cover like operation data. Even more, sometimes an instance asset deviates from the type asset (Soll-Ist) and also this needs to be considered. So it is very important to understand that a digital twin for an instance asset is not the same as an instance of a type in the sense of object orientation. So prototype might be the better wording.
Senior Executive at Planet Connected , Board Member at CereBulb
3 年Rob - could you expand some time on the front end work, technology, data, people skills etc that it takes to create a digital twin and use case? Much disillusionment, from my experience, comes from not understanding the organizational capability (including the data, engineering drawings, etc) required to create, use and maintain digital twins….especially with a ??brown field?? OEM.