Virtual replicas for very real purposes: the "digital twins"

If you are flying soon, chances are that your Airbus or Boeing aircraft uses "digital twins" technology. In effect, there is a digital replica of the same aircraft you will be flying, an indistinguishable counterpart of the original that helps companies optimize manufacturing and maintenance to make better decisions.

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Although we are talking about cutting-edge technology, the concept is not so recent. It is attributed to David Gelernter ter, a writer and professor at 耶鲁大学 who in the early 1990s described it in his book "Mirror Worlds". A decade later, fellow professor Michael Grieves of the Florida Institute of Technology applied it to the manufacturing concept, and later that decade NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration brought it to market by using it to maintain and repair systems that were far away from them.

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But what is a digital twin? It is a virtual representation of an object or system that is updated from real-time data. They are used to save time and money whenever a product or process needs to be tested, whether in design, implementation, testing, monitoring or improvement.

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There are all kinds of digital twins, depending on their field of application, and several can co-exist at the same time in the same subject. Furthermore, they are usually categorized according to their functional complexity. First we have the basic unit, which is the smallest example of a functioning component. Next, when two or more are combined they create the assets, and these in turn can be expanded into a system that allows visualization of the interaction between the assets. And finally we have the macro process level where the systems work together to create a complete production facility.

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In #Spain, the energy sector is actively testing this new technology to improve the operation of specific assets. In this sense, Repsol group plans and models the performance of its plants in real time and Iberdrola uses it in renewable energy production to develop the electrical substation of the future.

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On the other hand, there are companies that use it for a specific part, as is the case of Navantia, S.A., S.M.E , a Spanish shipbuilding company, which has successfully experimented with it at its Ferrol Innovation and Services Center to improve the operational safety of ships and optimize their maintenance by digitally replicating the air conditioning module. In the pharmaceutical industry, the biology company DeepLife digitally replicates human cells to evaluate their response to new drugs. Biologists can access an interpretable representation of cellular mechanisms, highlighting the most likely pathways and drug targets.

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Other companies are using it to represent virtually the entire life cycle of their products already in production. This is the case of the car manufacturer Porsche AG , which analyzes driving to identify future chassis failures before they occur; the compressed air supplier Kaeser Compressors USA , which obtains operational data on air consumption during operation to know its real consumption and charge its customers per service rather than at a fixed rate; and the airline KLM Royal Dutch Airlines , which by replicating its transport units monitors them in real time, simplifying their management and avoiding downtime.

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Digital twins link the digital world with the physical world by constantly exchanging data to faithfully reflect real-world behavior. With this, they can perform virtual tests, optimize performance, predict failures and simulate future scenarios without putting real assets at risk. This has the economic potential to save costs, reduce operational complexity, create new business models and improve service quality.

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However, although it is a very promising technology, building a digital twin is difficult and expensive. To work, they need to collect through multiple sensors a lot of very heterogeneous and concrete operational data, which are complicated to manipulate and analyze by algorithms. In addition, they combine a variety of advanced technologies such as the Internet of Things to capture the data, artificial intelligence to use it, and augmented and mixed reality to create the immersive simulations.? There is neither a standard nor a "digital twin" platform to combine them, nor do industrial companies have all the necessary knowledge, as they are still in the process of digitization, gradually adopting some of these technologies and not all of them at the same time.

Published in @El Mundo / Actualidad Economica on June 8th , 2023

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