Nextplainer – Digital Twins

If you have ever watched a comedy movie about twins (for the 90s kids in India- ‘Judwaa’ would ring a loud bell) – you will have no trouble understanding this fascinating concept.

You tickle one person from the twin-pair and the other person giggles. You slap one person and the other holds a red cheek in surprise. It’s simple. Anything done to one – affects the other. Why? Well, because they are ‘twins’. And special ones at that.

Now take this concept to a factory or a R&D lab or a car design studio. You cannot afford to tickle, slap or tweak a full-blown machine or an aircraft engine or a concept Batmobile. It’s expensive. It’s risky. And it’s tiring. Specially when things don’t go the way you want and you end up picking pieces from the floor.

The simple answer – which, thanks to advancements in simulation, virtualisation, sensors and software technologies, is now possible – is to work on a ‘Digital Twin’. It’s the copy of a physical asset or process in a digital environment – down to the minutest feature, function or part. By attaching smart sensors and wielding virtualisation on the physical asset, data is collected and replicated on the digital one. These twins work on a number of technologies like- Internet of things (IoT), smart sensors, machine learning models, Industrial IoT, simulation technologies etc. Just imagine simulation – like how a pilot can learn to fly a plane without actually sitting in one for initial trainings. But this one goes to an extreme- it all happens in real time.

What you, thus, enjoy is an exact replica of the big asset or the complex process you want to experiment with, innovate on or monitor. Be it a big machine or a bridge or a smart city or a building or a farm or a turbine or a spacecraft - You don’t have to fiddle with the huge, intricate and turnkey stuff now. Just try your ideas on the digital copy. You can get all the feedback and results you want from the actual machine or process. You can test a new design or create a new feature or do a high-stake maintenance or repair a broken part or reconfigure the process and so on- on the digital look-alike. This not only saves money and effort but also spares a company expensive downtime and accidents.

This is the new inflection point of a journey that started with prototyping, 3D designs, simulations, CAD (Computer-Aided Design) and CAM (Computer-Aided Manufacturing). It has evolved to the level of Digital Twins now. And companies are embracing this idea with a lot of excitement.

Unlike twins in Bollywood, these creatures do not have any separation and reunion drama going on. They are pretty boring. But that’s good news for companies. Right?

(Let us know what other technologies you want us to cover in the coming issues).