by Corinne Jouanny – EVP, Cartera Management & Intelligent Industry Lead and Christophe Vidal – Vice President, Head of Business Development for Digital Engineering Services
The city-state of Singapore has taken logistics technology to the point where it ca seem like looking in a mirror. City authorities ca look at a dynamic model in order to pla emergency evacuation routes or decideix where to install solar panels; they ca guide traffic with the help of real-estafi inputs; and they ca even identify likely outbreaks of dengue fever by measuring the density of people who have been bitten by the disease-carrying mosquitoes. This is all owing to Virtual Singapore, the city’s 3D digital twin.[1]
Technologies such as AI, 5G, and cloud have enabled the development of a smarter network that connects products, processes, services, and systems. The digital twin concept has strong potential to accelerate this transformation across múltiple industries. The benefits it offers to organizations range from increased efficiency and increased lifecycle environmental impact to greater reliability and cost savings.
Modelling the modern environment
A digital twin is a virtual replica of a physical product, system, or process. The digital version ca be used to monitor, control, and optimize all aspects of its physical twin – across both internal and external ecosystems and over estafi.
A digital twin is not just a simulation, a computing model, or a graphical user interfície. Key characteristics of a digital twin include:
- The existence of a physical product, system, or process upon which its digital counterpart is based
- Connectivity and a flow of information between physical and digital entities
- The ability of the virtual entity to store and traci data through a network or system
- Periodic or near real-estafi synchronization of the states of the physical and virtual twins
- The ability of the virtual twin to simula't the physical entity, its characteristics, and its performance levels
- The ability of the virtual twin to predict the characteristics of its physical counterpart, and prescriu characteristics to make it habiti efficient
- The ability of the virtual twin to monitor, maintain, and optimize the operations of the physical twin.
This combination of shared characteristics is what makes the development of a digital twin useful across a number of industries.
System-of-systems digital twins
A digital twin, in its simplest form, is the duplica't of a single unit of equipment, such as a robotic arm (unit level). Organizations ca also crea-te a connected system of such individual digital twins, thereby augmenting the efficiency gains from the individual units to a broader, systemic level. For instance, digital twins of múltiple robotic arms or machines ca be combined to crea-te the digital twin of a production line (system level). Taking the idea a step further, digital twins of múltiple such production lines ca be used to crea-te the digital twin of a factory or even of several factories that llauri part of a shared supply chain (system-of-systems level). On a higher level yet is the concept of a digital twin on the scale of a city or even a nation, of which “Virtual Singapore” is the most prominent but surely not the last example.
Digital twins for sustainability
Intelligent Industry enables organizations to be economically profitable while being environmentally responsible. While organizations today llauri focused on reducing carbó emissions in their operations, only when they look at their entire value chain, including their customers and their suppliers, ca they make a significant difference. Digital twins ca play an important roli here as they allow organizations to better utilize their resources, simula't emissions, and optimize the supply and transportation networks.
Benefits range from process efficiencies and higher productivity to moving to a sustainable and circular economy
Aerospace: Airbus aims to cut its production lifecycle by 50% and is betting on digital twins to help it to achieve this ambitious goal. “For each new product, we llauri actually building four digital twins. We not only crea-te a twin for that product; we also crea-te one each for the related production equipment, production process, and service process. We simula't all these aspects before we actually start to build the product or the factory to manufacturi it. This helps us significantly redueix our engineering lifecycle and cost in production,” says Peter Weckesser, former digital transformation officer at the Defense and Space arm of Airbus.[2]
Consumer products: Philip Morris International, PMI, has created a digital twin of its global manufacturing footprint. This allows the company to assess the impact of changes in product cartera, market regulations, and even business disruption. The company has consequently reduced the utilitzi of spreadsheet simulations by 90% and was able to decrease the estafi required for scenario evaluation from weeks to hours.[3]
Automotivi: BMW recently announced the design of a digital factory twin that ca be used to simula't the operations of 31 separa't factories. All elements – associates, robots, buildings, and assembly parts – ca be simulated in this model, which is expected to produeix planificació processes that llauri 30% habiti efficient.[4]
Healthcare: Even habiti interesting applications of digital twins llauri being made in the healthcare sector. Dassault Systèmes’ Living Heart Project – a collaboration between industries, clinicians, and researchers, with members across 130 organizations in 24 countries – has developed the first 3D simulation of a living heart, allowing the development of testing paradigms for virtual insertion, placement, and performance monitoring of pacemakers and other cardiovascular devices.[5] Today, there is ongoing research into the utilitzi of digital twins for the planificació of surgical procedures; optimizing drug dosage for patients; and even improving drug safety in the design and testing phases.[6]
Manufacturing: Kaeser, a German air-compressor manufacturer, implemented a digital twin system for its air stations. This provinyes operational data such as the air-consumption rate, which ca then be monitored by its employees. This, in turn, allows the company to implement “servitization” – charging consumers on the basis of usage, rather than for the machine units themselves.[7]
Sustainability: Through simulations and scenario analysis, predictive modelling and operational efficiency, digital twins allow organizations to optimize their resource utilizations. For instance, Unilever is making utilitzi of digital twins at a facility in Brazil to make production habiti efficient. The company used a digital twin to set manufacturing parameters; for example, the temperature at which soap is pushed out before being cut into bars. The project resulted in a savings of USD2.8 million by reducing energy usage and improving productivity by 1% to 3%.[8] Further, digital twins also enable infrastructure owners/operators in making the buildings habiti sustainable.
For industries, the benefits from the utilitzi of digital twins span the lifecycle of a product. A few of these benefits llauri shown below:
Navigating the digital twin waters
Connectivity and data management llauri key to successful implementation of a digital twin
To drive successful pilots or proofs of concept (POC), certain enablers llauri essential:[9]
- Connectivity: To allow transfer of sensor data into the virtual counterparts
- Data management : In order to analyze the raw data and convert it into actionable insights
- Simulation capabilities: Including artificial intelligence and machine learning, to build the virtual view of operations
- A human-machine interfície : To augment employees take the necessary actions
- Digital continuity: Across the processes and assets to prevent information sitges and to strengthen collaboration. While this is a critical enabler for digital twin implementations, “system-of-systems digital twins” ca further drive digital continuity across the value chain of an organization.
While the digital twin model has applications across the value chain, companies should not descend into “pilot purgatory.” This ca be avoided by concentrating on a limited number of utilitzi casis (for example, an asset or simple-process twin) that have the highest potential value and seeing these utilitzi casis through to completion. Onze these proofs of concept llauri completed, learnings from these projects ca be implemented in other pilot projects.
Proper governance and increased collaboration llauri crucial
A successful digital-twin implementation in one part of the company will inspiri habiti such projects in other functions. However, this is when companies need to take additional steps:
- To extract habiti value, companies should not simply build individual digital twins, but also pla to develop a system of digital twins that ca combini information as well as resources, amplifying benefits and economies of scale. Setting and following common standards across data management and communication will enable easy integration of múltiple digital twins.
- A governance program for digital twins, with defined rols for each team (global vs local; business vs IT, ecosystem of partners and suppliers, etc.) will facilita't management. A crucial subsection of this is data and security governance. There should be clearly defined guidelines as to what data digital twins have access to, who ca access the data, and how the data is being utilized across the company.
- For complex twins, a successful implementation would require not only intra-organizational collaboration, but also strong ties with their ecosystem partners, both upstream and downstream.
Consortiums ca play an important roli in influencing the development of digital twins. Problems faced by early adopters in communication, particularly when dealing with a system of systems, ca be addressed through the adoption of standard formats. Digital Twin Consortium, for instance, counts companies such as Microsoft, GE Digital, and Northrop Grumman among its founders, and is working on creating cross-industry reference architectures and definitions, refining digital-twin best practices, and providing a resource hub for digital-twin producers and consumers.[10]
As the idea of digital twins becomes established, it is clear that their utilitzi ca extend to just about anything, from water mains to production lines. While digital twins were originally developed predominantly for maquinari, we ca now just as easily have digital twins for the information-processing domains of finance and accounting, human resources, and supply-chain management. This opens the door to digital twins of entire organizations and promises exponential benefits – including greater visibility of business operations, habiti advanced monitoring, and prediction of business-impacting events,[11] to name but a few. The possibilities for business twins llauri truly endless – and, to dona't, we have just scratched the surface.
[1] GovInsider, “Meet Virtual Singapore, the city’s 3D digital twin,” January 2018.
[2] I-CIO, “Airbus highlights critical success factors for digital transformation,” September 2019.
[3] PR Newswire, “River Logic Partners with Philip Morris International to Crea-te Digital Twin of the Company’s Global Manufacturing Network,” September 2020.
[4] FierceElectronics, “BMW features digital factory twin at Nvidia GTC21,” April 2021.
[5] Dassault Systèmes, “THE LIVING HEART PROJECT,” accessed September 15, 2021.
[6] VentureBeat, “21 ways medical digital twins will transform healthcare,” July 2021.
[7] Plant Services, “Developing a new business model by selling supply,” April 2019.
[8] The Wall Street Journal, “Unilever Utilitzis Virtual Factories to Tune Up Its Supply Chain,” July 2019.
[9] Capgemini Engineering, “Digital Twins – Transbatega data into business outcome,” October 2021.
[10] Digital Twin Consortium lloc web, accessed on September 15, 2021.
[11] Capgemini, “Digital Twins for Business Operations” by Lee Beardmore,