A digital twin is a digital copy of an asset, process, or system that captures its characteristics and changes in real time. Performance tracking and improvement, automation, and data collection for effective decision-making are just a short list of the benefits this technology can offer.
In this article, we are going to look at digital twins from the inside to understand how to incorporate this technology into the company effectively.
What Is Behind the Digital Twin?
The digital twin architecture is, essentially, both physical and digital. It includes three layers:
The hardware layer comprises the physical components of a digital twin such as routers, actuators IoT sensors, and edge servers.
The middleware layer is all about data governance, processing, integration, visualization, modeling, connectivity, and control.
The software layer consists of analytics engines, ML models, data dashboards, as well as modeling and simulation software.
The most important building blocks of digital twin layers deserve a detailed description.
Data Platform
The digital twin is all about monitoring, capturing, and processing the device’s or system’s data to deliver insights the decision-makers can act on. The Data Platform is one of the main digital twin components. It ensures secure data ingestion and processing, as well as steady performance, normalization, management, machine learning, AI analytics, microservices, and integration.
This module requires robust capacities for data storage and a cloud-based ML platform for analytics.
Tech Stack: AWS, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Dynamo BD
Visualization
A vital component of a digital twin platform. This model translates the status data, analytics insights, and forecasts into formats suitable for human perception. As a result, we get a connected environment of the virtual copy with the physical world.
The Visualization module is responsible for delivering data insights to end users, simulation, and intelligent operations. The digital twin’s dashboards and commands rely on this module for correct functionality.
Tech Stack: Unity, WebGL, three.js, PlayCanvas.
Workflow, and APIs
This module serves to pull and share data from different sources for building a DT solution. It is also responsible for changing the digital twin parameters and synchronizing the copy with its prototype in the physical world.
It is essentially all about workflows, operations, processes, and event-based flows.
Tech Stack: AWS API Gateway, Node JS/ SpringBoot.
Governance & Operations
Important elements of the data platform architecture. The digital twin is, essentially, a data powerhouse. So the Governance & Operations module is necessary to ensure that data is structured and available on demand.
This module ensures proper data governance and its capability to deliver value.
Tech Stack: AWS Glue.
Hybrid
The digital twin infrastructure is complex and combines cloud and on-prem elements. Hybrid infrastructure is necessary to support continuous integration and delivery. Furthermore, it provides the capability to create, train, and bring into action machine learning modules and ensure efficiency.
Technologies used: cloud and edge computing.
Custom digital twin development is a complex process requiring robust technological capabilities, diverse skill sets, and flexibility. Because a digital twin implementation requires the integration of IoT, machine learning, robotics, VR, and advanced 3d visualizations, the development process involves scrupulous planning.
5 Steps To Creating Well-Performed Digital Twin
How to create a digital twin? All in all, the stages of digital twin building follow the same logic as other products and services. Because of its multifaceted and complex nature, though, each step of the digital twin product development involves thorough preparation.
#1. Assess Process Opportunities for Your Business
At this stage, you should define the scope and scale of your DT solution. The list of questions to ask yourself at this point includes:
- Will you be replicating an entire system or device or just part of it?
- Who will be running the digital twin: your employees or end users?
- Will users be accessing it remotely or on-site?
- Which functions do you want to replicate?
At the end of this stage, you should have a precise vision of the functionality you want to perform and the goals you want to accomplish using a digital twin platform. Finally, when you have the complete feature set and specification ready, you may move on from the ideation stage to digital twin development.
#2. Create an MVP Digital Twin Solution
The set of features from the previous stage will dictate your project's tech stack and architecture. Before you build a minimal viable product (MVP) version of your digital twin, decide which features are absolute must-haves and which you will be adding at later stages.
#3. Stabilize the MVP and Mature
Building an MVP version of your digital twin solution will help you test your product and implement changes. This will give you an understanding of what features or processes you need to add or exclude from your final product version. Allow your MVP to stabilize and mature before you proceed with the digital twin building.
#4. Add Additional Areas and Processes
When it comes to making changes and improvements, nothing works better than a real-life test drive. The MVP product stage should have helped you adjust your product requirements and decide which processes you want to replicate in the final version of your digital twin.
#5. Monitor Progress and Return on Investment
Once your digital twin platform is up and running, you’re not done yet. Digital twins are dynamic replicas of real-world assets capable of changing and developing in line with the current business needs. Tracking your progress and ROI, as well as continuous support and maintenance will ensure that the digital product you’ve built truly lives up to your expectations and delivers value.
Final Thoughts
To maximize the benefits of using digital twins, it is necessary to approach its creation deliberately. In this article, we considered the main components of virtual copy and the steps to its implementation. But yet, the detailed process of developing this technology depends on the specifics of your business and your needs.
Also published here.