Digital Twin as a strategic technology trend: meaning, benefits & examples

There is not yet so much information about the buzzword and technology – Digital Twin, even though, it is already listed in the next technology trends and used by many companies. Today, I would like to make it more clear what this concept actually does, how and what are the benefits for companies using it, of course, listing real cases.

The concept of a virtual, digital equivalent to a physical product or the Digital Twin was introduced in 2003 at University of Michigan. At that time the introduced concept and digital representations of actual physical products were really new and immature; the information was limited, paper-based.

However, in the decade that has followed, the information technology supporting both the development and maintenance of the virtual product and the design and manufacture of the physical product has exploded. Virtual products are rich representations of products that are virtually indistinguishable from their physical counterparts.

For better understanding the concept, let’s take a look at the simple example. Imagine that we have the information or document that we need to save for the later use. Once the full document or the information we need from the paper document is scanned and archived or used to drive whatever business process, we can do two things with the original paper: get rid of it or keep it, for instance for regulatory reasons. If we trash it, the paper-free dream, it’s gone and all we have is that digital information; no copy. With a digital twin, as the name indicates, we have two versions of a ‘thing’: the physical one and the digital twin one.

The digital twin concept is built on three pillars:

• A physical product in real space,  • A virtual product in virtual space, • The connection of data and information that ties the virtual and real products together.

Since the model was introduced, there have been changes and increases in the amount, richness and fidelity of information of both the physical and virtual products; for example, on the virtual side, there were added numerous behavioral characteristics so that we can not only visualize the product, but we can test it for performance capabilities.