Digital twin technology has been growing in popularity within the engineering and IT community over the past several years. The concept originated in the early 2000s, but today, digital twin is one of the most talked about and innovative forms of emerging technology.
Digital twins are digitized representations of real-life objects, systems, and/or processes. They can provide significant insight on how something will perform if implemented in the physical world. Using real time data and simulation, digital twin technology follows a product or system throughout its lifecycle and supports engineers in making informed decisions about the physical parts and systems it represents.
Digital Twin Pros
Digital twins can benefit the engineering industry greatly as they have the capacity to better future parts and systems, expedite time to market, store knowledge, and better connect information.
Forward-Thinking Technology
Digital twin is a forward-thinking technology and creates the ability for high-speed change down the road. Having a body of data that represents a real-world object or process is helpful as it can better inform engineers when designing future parts and systems. A digital twin can provide valuable insight into current state operation, but it really elevates engineering practice when it’s used to predict future scenarios or iterate design possibilities without doing a physical build.
Faster Development
Along with creating the ability for high-speed change, digital twin technology generates faster development, prototyping, and testing processes. Once digital twins have been created and are on file, engineers can reference that information when starting new projects as opposed to starting from scratch. Having a library of reference models readily available can act as a huge time save.
Codifies Tacit Knowledge
Digital twin technology can act as a more complete archive for easily lost knowledge. Every year, valuable information is lost as people retire and leave the workforce. When tacit knowledge is forgotten, it makes design and manufacturing processes more difficult and time consuming as engineers are forced to build projects from the ground up and relearn from experience.
Complete modeling of system interactions and usage scenarios within a digital twin construct can be a more thorough and sophisticated method for documenting knowledge and insights from previous projects. Engineers will have the ability to store valuable information within digital twins that can be tracked, traced, and referenced by others at later times.
Better Connects Information
Delivering a digital twin requires a complete connection between engineering processes and information. Actions or documentation that live outside of the raw engineering data or Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) system can become disconnected from the bigger picture. This often happens to data created in early project phases. The process of building an accurate digital twin demands that these data sets be connected to the rest of the system, and that any changes to these data sets drive corresponding changes throughout the rest of the system.
When implemented properly, the digital twin will inform the engineer of relevant information outside of the PLM system and automatically flow down the changes and implications of that information to the rest of the system.
Digital Twin Cons
While digital twins can offer worthwhile advantages, there are challenges to getting the technology off the ground and managing it through lifecycle phases.
Digital Infrastructure
One of the biggest challenges associated with digital twins has to do with the digital infrastructure that is required. For digital twin technology to work, a model based environment is needed. This can be a tough obstacle to overcome as interoperable assets are complex. If an organization is not already operating in a digital environment, they will need to create one.
To create an ecosystem for digital twins to thrive in, an organization needs a fully integrated software environment. This is important because all software must work in sync, and data must easily transfer throughout the systems that manage the digital twin’s lifecycle.
Creating the right environment is difficult. Most companies operate using a patchwork of software and tools that were not designed to be fully compatible. It is possible to create these integrations, but it takes time and resources.
Maintenance
Once a digital twin is created, it must be maintained. Over the course of a lifecycle, physical objects will deviate from their digital twin due to several factors such as operating conditions, age, wear and tear, etc. If the digital twin is not maintained and able to keep up with changes that occur within the physical version, it will no longer be an accurate representation of the physical asset, and the overall purpose of the digital twin is defeated.
It is difficult to maintain a digital asset. Many digital twin efforts fail because the digital assets don’t receive the same maintenance effort as the physical ones. The digital twin requires consistent upkeep, significant observation, and time to document all real-time changes. If done properly, the digital twin should provide insight into the effects of operating conditions before the physical twin experiences them.
Are Multiple Digital Twins Needed?
When creating a digital twin for an object, one consideration that must be made is if a digital twin is needed for every configuration or serial number. To determine if one or multiple digital twins will be needed, engineers must decide how much detail and information they want back from the physical object to feed into the digital asset.
Take a lawn mower for an example. While it’s safe to assume each person who owns the same lawn mower uses it to cut grass, there will likely be differences in the way the mower is used from one person to another. Those differences could include variation in climate/weather conditions, time increments the mower is run, etc. It is important to account for the differences because they could impact how the object deviates from the digital twin overtime.
Engineers must determine how to account for the differences in how each individual product is used. While it is unrealistic to create and manage digital twins for every product configuration, engineers may be able to meet in the middle and create digital twins for specific climates that account for environmental and operating conditions.
Do the Pros Outweigh the Cons?
Digital twin technology is currently a fantasy to some degree as the benefits are not truly understood within the engineering industry because digital twin technology has not been widely implemented at a high level. The most successful cases of the technology are when the digital asset is created first and the physical twin is derived after. Engineers are working to figure out how to connect all the dots and overcome obstacles to make the technology work as well as it can. It is likely that there is a lot of untapped potential and huge advantages to digital twin that have not been discovered yet.
Right now, the cons to digital twin make the technology tough to implement at full capacity. However, if an organization can overcome the obstacles, they will greatly benefit. To learn more about digital twin technology and how it can benefit your organization click here.
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