I want to give a more dedicated focus on the digital twin that is becoming more dominating in our world. So I will explore these increasingly over different posts. This is the first to give a short history and explanation of digital twins before we look deeper into the role the digital twin is taking in industrial predictive applications and visualization and how this is evolving into being comprehensive in its design, allowing twins to be built on processes, products and production to relate, anticipate and simulate actual activities or physical needs.

So, where are we on understanding the value of having a digital twin? No, not yet one for ourselves but given time we will, we already have a digital twin of a heart.

I was reading a post by Dr Heppel, “Healthcare solution testing for future | Digital Twins in healthcare.”

“Digital Twins of complete human beings are still a futuristic dream now. However, some headway has been made with, for example, Dassault’s commercially released “Living Heart”—the first realistic model of a human organ that accounts for electricity, mechanics, and blood flow in the heart. The software can turn a 2D scan from an individual human into a personalized full-dimensional model of their heart.

The user can manipulate it—stick in pacemakers, reverse its chambers, cut any cross-section, and run hypotheticals. The Digital Twin has been pieced together from information shared by numerous research groups. To make a Digital Twin of a whole human body, all organs need to be modelled and integrated. Since many organs are more complex than the heart (e.g. the brain), this may still take a lot of work to achieve.”

The growing value of having a digital twin of our physical assets in manufacturing operations or applications or to assist in health where they require the need to monitor, diagnose or be prognostic to optimize asset performance and utilization is increasingly providing new additional value.

Examples of industry applications are aircraft engines, wind turbines, large structures like offshore platforms, offshore vessels, locomotives, buildings, health equipment like scanners, hospitals or whole production plants. Today, we see digital twins in complex, large industry assets but increasingly value smaller assets. Digital Twins of farms, jet engines, whole planes, cars, coffee machines, factories that make machines, oil drills, and wind parks.

Origins

The term “Digital Twin” was defined by Dr Michael Grieves at the University of Michigan around 2001-2002. He originally defined this in the context of Product Lifecycle Management. In his paper, he introduced the concept of a “Digital Twin” as a virtual representation of what has been manufactured. He promoted the idea of comparing a Digital Twin to its engineering design to understand better what was produced versus what was designed, tightening the loop between design and execution.

Tom Maurer, Senior Director of Strategy at Siemens PLM Software, defines the Digital Twin as “a digital model that accurately represents a product, production process or the performance of a product or production system in operation.”

GE suggest “a Digital twin refers to a digital replica of physical assets, processes and systems that can be used for various purposes. The digital representation provides both the elements and the dynamics of how an Internet of Things device operates and lives throughout its life cycle.”

Srivathsan Govindarajan, Vice President, SAP Digital Twin, summarized it as: “A Digital Twin is a dynamic digital representation of a live physical object and needs to represent specific aspects of physical objects like shape, working state and structural behaviour. Digital Twins will dynamically change in near real-time as the state of the physical object changes.”

Ultimately, a Digital Twin will unify all the data an organization needs.

To many, the Digital Thread is considered to end within manufacturing, but it is so much more.

Lets firstly, look at the concept of the digital thread. Not only does a digital thread enable secure and effective data collaboration both internally and externally, but it also supports the entire PLC System to an ISO standard.

The concept of a Digital Thread has been gaining traction for a while.

It often seems to be focused on manufacturing: Digital thread is a communication framework that connects traditionally siloed elements in manufacturing processes and provides an integrated view of an asset throughout the manufacturing lifecycle.

The digital thread refers to the communication framework that allows a connected data flow and integrated view of the asset’s data throughout its lifecycle across traditionally siloed functional perspectives.It has been depicted as the equivalent of the rail map of all the connecting stations, explaining how and where you need to go.

“The digital model matures through the product lifecycle during design, manufacturing and operation,” said Robert Harwood, Global Industry Director at ANSYS. “This digital connectivity through the life cycle can be described as a Digital Thread, which is not linear but circular, with data from all stages being fed back into the product ideation and creation stages.”

Maurer agreed: “We connect this information with the Digital Thread. We see the Digital Twin as a level of intelligence to predict real-world performance, and the Digital Thread is the connectivity and context for business decisions. It connects the design, operation and simulation information.”

Doug Macdonald, director of Product Marketing at Aras, describes Digital Thread as the connective tissue between the Digital Twin, IoT, and any other data source. It’s the channel through which information is fed back into simulations, product design and other aspects of the Digital Twin.

The digital twin provides the insights to inform the physical and influence its performance

The digital twin has become not just the backbone of manufacturing; it has become the backbone for designing cities. The tangible and physical design needs to design such things as aircraft, buildings, complex hospital machines, cars and understanding complexity in the flows in air movement, water, ingredient mixing for example.

The digital twin has become essential in the food processing industry and is rapidly taking hold in the pharmaceutical and chemical industry. Understanding the full process and its design relies on the digital twin increasingly to inform and evaluate options and operational design.

The evolution of the digital twin is promising and equally exciting. It is delivering the digital ecosystems of design.