Why Digital Twins Are Important for Your Digital Journey?

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Hello all, welcome back to TransformTechX. Sorry for the long break, its been a month since I published my last edition. Last few weeks have been busy, lots of exciting stuff to share, I will save it for later. Lets get back to today's topic of Digital-Twins.

Digital Twins are everywhere, and concept can be applied to almost anything. It has gained substantial momentum in Digital Strategy.

To understand why Digital Twins are Important for your Digital Journey? you need to first understand What is Digital Twin ?

What is Digital Twin?

A digital twin is a simplified representation of an actual product or process that exists virtually.

Have you heard of digital twins? They're revolutionizing the way we think about product and process simulation, and they're becoming increasingly important for organizations across all industries.

I'm excited to delve deeper into the world of digital twins and explore the possibilities they offer.?

In the early 2000s, a digital twin was simply a 3D representation of a product or equipment.?

However, advancements in technology, such as FEA and IoT, have allowed us to create much more sophisticated digital twins that are able to simulate end-to-end processes, virtual representations and also provide predictive insights.

What are different types of Digital Twins?

Exploring the Three Types of Digital Twin!

As digital twins gain more popularity, businesses are leveraging this technology to create virtual replicas of physical devices, assets, systems, or processes.

Digital twin allows organizations to simulate, test, and optimize various aspects of their operations, leading to increased efficiency, productivity, and cost savings.

There are four main types of digital twins that businesses can use to create virtual replicas.

1. Product Digital Twin- This is a virtual replica of a physical product. This type of digital twin allows businesses to test the product's performance, identify potential issues, and optimize its design and functionality.
2. Process Digital Twin - This is a virtual replica of a business process, such as a supply chain or manufacturing process. This type of digital twin allows businesses to simulate and optimize the process, identify bottlenecks or inefficiencies, and make data-driven improvements.
3. System Digital Twin- This is a virtual replica of a complex system, such as a smart city or a power grid. This type of digital twin allows businesses to monitor and optimize the system's performance, predict and prevent issues, and improve overall efficiency and sustainability.
4. Asset Twins - Asset twins are the fourth type of digital twins. These are essentially the models of physical assets such as machines and vehicles or buildings. They provide real-time telematics information about the asset in the field, e.g. This helps organizations to improve availability and reduce downtime. This helps improve the operational efficiency.

Why Digital Twin is Important?

Digital twins are rapidly transforming industries, and the four types of digital twins offer businesses the opportunity to optimize their products, processes, systems and overall assets. It offers numerous advantages.

Each type of digital twin offers unique benefits and can be customized to meet the specific needs of different industries and organizations. Here are some of the top benefits-

• Improved performance monitoring- process and asset twins can be used for performance monitoring. Asset twins giving ability to monitor performance realtime. This results in reducing downtime of the asset.
• Predictive Analytics- The Digital twins helps in Predictive analytics offering insights and predictions for the system.
• Optimized systems and assets- With Digital Twins you can run offline what-if scenarios to optimize and improve systems performance.
• Cost savings- Digital Twins help reduce the costs as you would be able to avoid physical trials. The development of Digital Twins require initial investment of money and time, however the returns could extent 5-10x.
• Improved Collaboration- The Digital Twins offer ability to collaborate more effectively, as you have an internal standardised platform to collaborate across the teams.

Step by Step approach for developing Digital Twins!?

Enabling Digital Twin technology involves creating a virtual replica of a physical object or system, which can then be used for simulation, testing, and analysis. The types of Digital Twins can vary depending on the complexity of the system being modelled.

Here are some steps to enable Digital Twin technology and the different types of Digital Twins:

• Define the scope of the Digital Twin: Identify the system or product that will be modeled, and determine the level of detail required. This will help determine the types of Digital Twins that will be needed.
• Collect data: The Digital Twin requires data inputs to accurately simulate the physical system. This data can come from sensors, monitoring equipment, and other sources.
• Choose a platform: Select a platform that can handle the complexity of the Digital Twin and provide the necessary tools for modeling, simulation, and analysis.
• Develop the Digital Twin: Use the data inputs to build the virtual model of the physical system. This can involve creating a 3D model, developing algorithms to simulate behavior, and integrating different components.

What are the Examples of Digital Twin?

Industries have been using Digital Twins from several years, following are some of the real use cases-

• Volvo (Automotive)- Volvo uses 3D flow simulations with the help of CFD (computational fluid dynamics) to optimize the Aerodynamics of the vehicle. Reference- tobbler.com/digitaltwinexamples

• GE (Aviation)- GE has been one of the pioneers in Digital Twins. They have been using Digital twins for various use cases. GE has created a virtual replica for their aviation engine, enabling them to try new ideas, get early feedback.

• ABB (Robotics): ABB uses Digital Twins to check various configurations and programs for their robots virtually before they are built out physically.

There are several more examples of Digital Twins refer additional links below -

9 Amazing Examples of Digital Twin Technologies for Industries

4 Types of Digital Twins (Basic Overview with Examples)

Digital Twin is an essential part of your Digital Transformation journey. Whether you are in manufacturing, Banking, finance, CPG Digital Twins gives a competitive advantage to the industry and drive forward with the innovation.

Digital Twin is the Future!

Agree?

Explore Amit's other well-received articles-

• 5 Amazing Examples of D2C (Direct to Consumer) Companies using Digital Transformation
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All views expressed in article are my own, it does not re-represent views of any of my current or past organizations.

Amit Kurhekar is a Digital Transformation Strategy and AI Expert with over two decades of experience in Fintech and CPG.

He regularly writes on the topics of?#DigitalTransformation #industry40 #ai #digitalbusinesstransformation