Inspiring Stories of Digital Twin (W10)

The digital twin might not be as charismatic as its flesh and blood twin, but it was ten thousand times more knowledgeable thanks to AI (artificial intelligence). A year later, news came out that Nvidia became the 5th member of the ‘trillion-dollar club’ which is no small feat. It is likely that the digital twin is a contributor to the success and astronomical rise of Nvidia. If this postulation is correct, all of us will rush to get involved in digital twin immediately. But how do we do it? This article should help.

Digital Twin is in its infancy. The above example is the tip of an iceberg that is developing under the waterline at a high speed. This iceberg is an umbrella for a lot of technological developments over time in the near future.

When we want to build a building (or make a complex product), we do the design on paper first. Here we see a digital version that leads to the creation of a physical version. If we install sensors in the building, sensor readings can go into the digital version to reveal the operation of the building driven by its occupants. This is Digital Twin in operation. Sensors are the key. They now exist as IOT- the Internet of Things which are individually addressable and accessible. Vehicle GPS navigation is the most successful application of digital twin on a global scale.

The first international technical standard has been developed to streamline future development processes for the manufacturing industry. It is ISO-23247-1:2021 Automation System and Integration- Digital Twin Framework for Manufacturing.

The visibility into process and operation enabled by digital twin enhances operation improvements to be made. The standard is an endorsement of the reality of Digital Twin. Major European vendors have also formed IDTA- Industrial Digital Twin Association (https://industrialdigitaltwin.org/en/) to push Industry 4.0 ahead.

At the time of writing this article, the author was involved in a building construction design project. When looking into automating the synchronization of building designs handled by various design engineers, BIM (building Information modelling) came up as the answer. Subsequent investigation led to giving up BIM due to its procedural burden on all engineers involved in the project. Potential physical clashing of pipes, tubes, wires, ducts and so on was eliminated as a dedicated exercise without involving BIM on the full scale. The decision was largely influenced by the lack of compliance of BIM to digital twin features for the design process. This is a real-life example of the use of digital twin concept.

Instead of spending millions of dollars to develop a digital twin with linked data, the author created a website digital twin (WDT) free of charge for experimentation of the concept. This WDT is an offline website meant to improve the quality of its online twin. It contains a shell similar to the asset admin shell (AAS) promoted by IDTA mentioned above. AAS is meta data. WDT is meta data plus contents. We can manipulate the offline twin any way we like, but not the online version.

The key message is that we can all have our fingers poking right now into the Digital Twin concept to improve the quality and performance of our physical assets. Discuss as you like. Join the challenge and have fun at the same time.