Are Digital Twins the Panacea Industries Have Been Waiting For?

At international airports, challenges like congestions at check-in points, immigration and retail outlets are common. But some progressive airports have overcome them bycreating their digital twin that gives realtime relevant information to inform crucial decisions like which gate a flight should land at to avoid bottlenecks. This can help mitigate security concerns and make decisions that drive retail business up.

Digital twins are powerful tools for companies, cities, and governments.

So What Are Digital Twins?
A digital twin is very simply put, a virtual replica of a physical asset, entity or system of any size or complexity. It can be anything a watch, car, building or city that comprises data that can virtually behave like its physical representation. Asit spans the lifecycle of the item, any alterations to it get virtually updated too in realtime.

Widespread Application Of Digital Twins
What can have a digital twin? From cities to government operations, from buildings to mines - anything can have a digital twin. That’s because digital twins offer capabilities across the spectrum, from a basic functional system to an advanced autonomous one. Digital twins can be classified under 5 levels:
•Level 1: Virtual Twin: Behaves exactly like its physical equal.
•Level 2: Connected Twin: Offers periodical insights into the entity’s performance.
•Level 3: Predictive Twin: Forecasts outcomes for complex machinery and operations.
•Level 4: Prescriptive Twin: Provides possible scenarios, suggestions and insights.
•Level 5: Autonomous Twin: Tackles problems and allows prescriptive and predictive analysis.

This shows that there is a digital twin for every need, making it invaluable in nearly every industry and vertical, operation and function. It’s no wonder then that by 2026, the global value of digital twins is expected to exceed $48 billion. That’s a dramatic rise from the $3.1 billion that it was at in 20201.

Digital Twins Quickly Enabling Progressive Growth
One of the fore most reasons digital twins have gained momentum is the overwhelming need for preventative measures and security across industries. In the aftermath of COVID-19, many industries like oil and gas, aviation, and energy have seen extensive losses. While the losses may not have been preventable, businesses realize that with digital twins they can help improve the efficiency of operations, predict security threats and enhance decision making, decreasing future losses.

What’s encouraging is that digital technologies like Real time 3D, IoT, big data, and AI essential enablers of digital twins have seen tremendous growth in recent years. Additionally, recent improvements in computing, interoperability, real time 3D visualization, and AR & VR capabilities are giving organizations confidence in digital twins. With more “things” being added to IoT, data scientists can now get realistic insights on important parameters of deployments.

Digital Twins At Work: Sales & Marketing And Operations/Facilities Management
Digital twins typically use machine learning, simulation, and reasoning to propel decision making and give a realistic understanding of how to make the physical entity more efficient.Two areas where digital twins offer unmatched support are sales and marketing and operations/facilities management. Let’s look at the role digital twins play in these areas:

Sales & Marketing:
Consumers’ behaviour – from discovery to purchase – has changed drastically. People are looking for unique experiences along the way. With digital twins, brands can meet these expectations. Here’s how:
•Boost online sales for products that are configurable with digital twins by offering engaging and
immersive experiences.
•Gain visibility into materials required, and source them sustainably, optimizing expenses.
•Provide more accurate details about products to help customers understand whether to purchase.

Take the case of eBay they incorporated 3D & AR capabilities to sell sneakers on their platform to provide a 3D digital twin of shoes down to features like textures and sole designs.

Dyson created a VR Demo to provide an immersive experience of products like hair dryers and straighteners virtually. This helped customers learn about the brilliant engineering behind the products and buy in VR to have them delivered home.

Operations/Facilities Management:
With digital twins, businesses can improve operational efficiency, monitor security, create better services, increase business margins and be faster to market products. This is possible with a realtime 3D digital twin that ingests data; builds manages and simulates the physical entity’s conditions; and deploys and analyses data for deep insights that are then ingested again, to restart the cycle.

Below are 4 instances of digital twin enabled connectivity in operations/facilities management:
•Sensor data, AI, and computer vision can be leveraged to conduct tests for efficient, safe, and effective outcomes across facility operations.
•Ensure better realtime collaboration among engineers and field workers, offer better data accessibility for enhanced decision-making in the construction business and reduce losses.
•Gain visibility into asset performance in realtime with advanced analytics to empower customers with information on safety concerns, maintenance needs, and more.
•Have information to operate a facility while monitoring its efficiency and managing its functions.

Conclusion
Several organizations have gained the edge to disrupt by understanding their capabilities and possibilities, evolving customer preferences (now in the metaverse), and matching the two as seamlessly as possible with the help of digital twins.