La digital transformation It has brought great changes and advances for all business sectors and industries. Currently, thanks to this, the so-called digital twins are booming.
These are a virtual model or replica of a product, process or service that simulates the behavior of its physical counterpart.
Its objective is to monitor, analyze the reaction it has to certain situations and improve its performance and effectiveness, allowing problems to be identified before they occur in reality.
Do you want to know more about it? Continue reading this article!
What are digital twins?
The term, also known as digital twins, It has its origins in NASA: during the 80s, the space agency began to carry out simulations on the behavior of equipment and ships to ensure the integrity of the astronauts and the viability of the missions.
However, this concept began to be applied to Industry 4.0 starting in 2003 thanks to advances in big data, cloud computing and the Internet of things.
But what is it really about?
A digital twin (GD) It is a replica or virtual model in the image and likeness of a product, service or process, And allows:
- analyze data
- Reduce costs
- Avoid problems (detecting them before they occur through system monitoring)
- Prevent downtime or downtime
- Develop new opportunities
- Increase productivity
- Plan a future through simulations
- Replicate the life cycle of a product
- Extend the useful life of products, processes or services
- Maximize data analysis
- Carry out experiments.
In other words, to simplify the term, we can say that just as a video game player experiences physical movements in a virtual environment, digital twins can replicate the real incidents and events of a business in the digital world.
How are digital twins developed?
Its operation can be explained as follows:
- It begins its life being built by applied mathematics specialists or data science experts. These professionals develop a mathematical model that simulates the original product or process (from the real world) and take it to the digital space.
- For this, real-time data is incorporated into the twin that is received by sensors or technologies related to the big data.
- Once the information is collected, it is processed with artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing (cloud computing) and machine learning algorithm (machine learning) to develop a “living” representation that behaves exactly like the physical one. This allows the digital twin simulate the physical object, provide information about its performance and potential problems.
Now, A digital twin can also be designed as a prototype before a physical version is built of a product, providing feedback as the project is refined.
How to adapt a company to digital twin?
First of all, to adapt it to a company it is necessary to take into account how a digital twin is developed.
So, starting from there, the first thing the organization must have is technology capable of collecting the data generated by the different components of the physical element.
To do this, it is necessary to install sensors and other tools that collect information in real time regarding the state of the process, product or service.
In turn, it is necessary that these physical components be connected to a cloud system. In this way, the information obtained is received and processed, and compared with other contextual parameters.
From there, it is now possible to digitally generate the element and test any changes that would be applied physically on it (only when its success has been proven in the virtual environment).
Now, in order to minimize the risk of failure when applying it, Gartner has shared three recommendations keys:
- Ensure the long-term life of digital models.
- Enrich the digital twin with additional information, that is, including data from various sources.
- Involve the entire value chain of the product or service.
By launching the virtual twin in a company, it will be possible to accelerate technological innovation processes within an organization.
How can a digital twin benefit the development of a business?
Digital twins are coming to transform numerous processes and be beneficial for all sectors, allowing:
- Build a virtual model enriched with all the physical experience, without having to make investments in tests or physical facilities.
- Let engineers and designers manage and perfect a product digitally without spending money on physical prototypes.
- Detect problems or failures in advance, reducing downtime or major damage.
- That factories that use these tools speed up their diagnostic and maintenance tasks on their communication networks and production equipment.
- Create, test and build equipment and bring them to the physical world only if the requirements and requirements of a product can be satisfied in the virtual sphere.
- Test the assembly of the components of an element in a virtual factory, detecting problems and solving them in that environment.
- Predict any incident, anomaly or future breakdown in the operation of the object they replicate, analyze the situation, propose solutions and implement them.
This is all!
El digital twin It is becoming a business imperative that covers the entire life cycle of a process, service or product.
Even Gartner predicts that by 2021 half of large industrial companies will use digital twins as a fundamental basis in their projects, which translates into a 10% improvement in their efficiency.
On the other hand, the consulting firm IDC detected improvements of 30% in the critical processes of companies that invested in this technology.
So if your company has the capability to consider digital twins or digital twins to change its course towards the era of Industry 4.0, what are you waiting for?
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Originally published on May 11, 2021, updated on November 30, 2023
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