Digital twins, our Manufacturing Tech Council spotlight, provides virtual representations of real-world physical assets, manufacturing processes, finished products, etc. The twins are the offspring of digital enablers like artificial intelligence, machine learning, increasingly smart sensors, IoT, as well as new networking and data handling capabilities. They enable new ways of looking at everything we do and everything we work with, and promise vast opportunities for optimizing, streamlining, and cutting costs.
To use the beloved phrase of the new-age company – delighting customers.
The physical and virtual entities are uniquely intertwined. Real-time sensor data from the physical asset or manufacturing process drives the activity and learning of the virtual model, which feeds back predictions, learnings and recommendations that improve the physical model. Over time, this relationship deepens with more data from which to draw inferences and learnings. As the underlying digital technologies improve and advance (smarter sensors, faster networks, improved analytics), the potential power and adaptability of the digital twin expands more than proportionally.
In the case of GE, which has received a great deal of recognition for its initiatives, digital twins not only helped reduce downtime and predict problems with assets like jet and locomotive engines, and wind turbines, they also created new service revenue streams by enabling data from across a customer base to help individual customers improve operations with GE’s advice. The findings from digital twins are used to improve the manufacturing process so that each generation of product is better than the previous one. (Note: GE’s Vinay Jammu, technology leader, Physical-Digital Analytics & Software at GE Global Research, will be our keynote speaker on this month’s Manufacturing Tech Council webinar.)
The digital twins concept is seductively simple. Create a living, breathing model that can be manipulated, tested against, and from which we can model all sorts of things. The trick – like digital transformation – is figuring out what that means for you and how you can apply the concept to change your business and industry. Digital twins are already employed to model smart cities and buildings, improve gaming experiences, innovative new retail environments and lots more. Imagine if we all had digital twins of ourselves and could see the impact in real-time of that extra slice of pie or a couple more laps around the block. (Probably not that far off, whether we want it or not!)
In our April webinar, we explored how manufacturing organizations capitalize on digital twins and share some technology that makes it easier to build and deploy digital twins. The hard part, which is the same as the exciting part, will be brainstorming about where this digitally enabled tool can take you. For more information on the Manufacturing Tech Council, visit www.Manufacturingtechcouncil.com.
