Focusing on industrial applications and managing assets, digital twins unlock the possibilities of augmented, mixed, and virtual realities, paired cloud, artificial intelligence, and edge computing.
Over the past few years, several researchers and industry leaders identified digital twins as one of three industrial IoT trends that manufacturers should consider. The concept behind digital twins is already established, but the support needed to make it widespread is rolling out now. This includes a common language to describe the built world in an easy way to model.
What are digital twins?
Digital twins are physically accurate, AI-enabled virtual representations of assets, environments, or processes that are perfectly synchronized with the real world. They allow companies to conduct virtual “what if” experiments of their production environments without causing disruption. For example, data captured from the equipment on a factory floor can predict why and how the equipment may fail. Likewise, data captured by sensors and IoT devices in a warehouse can help a supply chain team manage future inventory costs.
Simulation on digital twins could accelerate research and save money and resources
Power companies and other stakeholders in renewable energy are already using digital twins to simulate the efficiency of solar panels and wind turbines. For example, using historical data from weather stations and artificial intelligence in the cloud, new digital models allow engineers to determine the optimal position of wind turbines in a large installation to get the best efficiency and increase power production.
By using a digital twin, developers can understand how a wind farm would perform before having to build it. Additionally, they can use data collected from existing wind turbines to model future designs, match different turbine configurations, and make the best wind turbine for the real-life location of the farm.
Digital twins help manage entire buildings and campuses
The Brookfield One Manhattan West (OMW) building is a 2.1-million-square-foot, state-of-the-art office tower in New York City at Manhattan West. Before its construction, Brookfield envisioned a digitally enabled property. Specifically, they were interested in using digital-twin technology to create a virtual model of the building connected directly to infrastructure.
By designing the property with thousands of sensors and gateways from Day 1, Brookfield ensured that every asset in the building was connected and seamlessly sent data to the managing center. All collected data is then consolidated and sent to the cloud for analysis.
The OMW operators can immediately detect potential problems and act quickly using the digital twin, enhanced by augmented reality. For example, if an elevator is not working properly, a technician can disable it right from the digital replica and send a repair crew to fix it. Additionally, they can visualize the live data from the sensors to determine when a significant piece of equipment could fail and replace it before it happens, enabling predictive maintenance.
Furthermore, building managers and power companies can use the digital twin to understand and simulate the optimal use of HVACs. By analyzing sensor data from thermostats and creating a virtual simulation, they can experiment by adjusting the power of different units to provide the most comfort to residents and users while optimizing power consumption. Furthermore, sensors can indicate the real-time usage of rooms and spaces and adjust the temperature and humidity accordingly.
The same concept can be applied to several buildings in the same area and create an intelligent town solution.
“Now, with digital twins, when we start looking at the value that it can create in the operational phase — to the tenant, to the visitor, or to the user or the operator in the building — we start looking at the platform approach on a digital-twin scale, which means basically aggregating data and then bringing these new value-added PropTech use cases as well in the built environment,” said Elisa Rönkä, global head of SaaS sales for digital buildings at Siemens.
Omniverse - the digital twin solution for industrial applications
According to NVIDIA, with NVIDIA Omniverse™ Enterprise deployed on NVIDIA® OVX™, enterprises are developing physically accurate, AI-enabled, virtual simulations that are perfectly synchronized with the real world.
Amazon Robotics, the automation research arm of Amazon, has over half a million mobile drive robots to support warehouse logistics. Most of those robots are pods that move around the warehouse, delivering racks to fulfillment stations or moving entire facilities.
Now, Amazon Robotics is building AI-enabled digital twins for its warehouses in NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise to optimize warehouse design and flow, train more intelligent robot assistants, and gain overall productivity.
Cellular infrastructure leader Ericsson is now using digital twins for testing and optimizing the deployment of new 5G networks. They are creating virtual representations of cities using NVIDIA Omniverse Enterprise to simulate the best positioning of the new cells to provide optimal 5G coverage. The NVIDIA RTX-accelerated real-time ray tracing enables researchers to see precise representations of signal quality at every point in the city in real time.
These are only a couple of examples of the potential use of the digital twin in different industries. Currently, the technology is used for testing and training autonomous machines, validating autonomous vehicles, simulating critical weather scenarios, climate research, advanced medical training, and transforming manufacturing.
Augmented reality and digital twins are changing the way people work
By using augmented-reality headsets and digital simulations, many industries are changing how technicians, factory operators, health-care workers, and others accomplish their daily work.
Nowadays, augmented reality enables engineers to perform complex operations from a remote location while a local service rep does it in real time on the physical asset. The engineer can see what the local worker is doing and, using a digital twin, provide exact instructions to perform the necessary steps to complete the procedure.
In some hospitals, remote surgical procedures are now being performed using high-definition cameras and sensors. The remote doctors can direct the local surgical team or use robotic arms to accomplish complex procedures.
Using artificial intelligence, augmented reality, and digital twins, fleet operators are now optimizing freight routes, saving time and expensive fuel.
Digital twins are just beginning to revolutionize industries, and the best is yet to come
Sixty years ago, NASA created one of the first versions of a digital twin to simulate the lunar lander. The engineers that worked on that project, some of them still alive, will be amazed by the possibilities of today’s technology.
Digital twins are just starting to appear in many other industries, fueled by digital transformation, big data, and simulation technologies. In the next few years, we’ll see the potential of the application of real-time simulation, visualization, augmented and mixed reality, and the power of the cloud in many aspects of our daily lives.
More now than ever, we need technologies such as digital twins to help us reduce carbon emissions, optimize our operations to reduce waste, and enable a much more sustainable future.
