The mirrored world: What are the benefits of digital twins?
The concept of a digital twin — a digital representation of a physical object or process — isn’t new. NASA used something like it in 1970 when it modeled the Apollo 13 spacecraft to test and refine the solution that would bring the stricken craft home. Today, digital twins are more pervasive than ever, and this is driving an inflection point — the birth of the mirrored world.
According to the 2021 Accenture Technology Vision report, the rise of the mirrored world is being driven by leaders who are building vast networks of interlinked intelligent twins that comprise living models of whole factories, product lifecycles, supply chains, ports and even cities. They are bringing together data and intelligence to both represent the physical world in a digital space and to address bigger challenges.
The opportunities on offer in the mirrored world are a direct reflection of the extent to which businesses connect intelligent twins. Already, twins enable organizations to gather, visualize and contextualize data across projects and operations, using AI to run scenario modeling. But soon, leaders will have made data and intelligence the primary orchestrators of the business, increasing real-time agility at scale, overhauling their innovation processes and forming entirely new ecosystems and partnerships.
Enterprises that lag behind will struggle to participate in the markets and ecosystems of the future. Conversely, those that start today, building intelligent twins of their assets and piecing together their first mirrored environments, will be the ones that push industries — and the world — toward a more agile and intelligent future.
For businesses starting out on this journey, there are three things to consider:
Intelligent twins have the power to turn data into actionable, big-picture insights, but only if fueled by complete and accurate data. COVID-19 revealed that enterprises cannot rely on historic data blindly — they need to check and correct their models as the world changes. This approach requires a strategy for real-time data analytics that includes provisions for both IoT devices and sensors, and tools for data analysis and utilization.
When this is achieved, enterprises can unlock a new way of understanding the business, and a new way of running it. Take Ericsson and Vodafone as examples. The two companies are working with e.GO, an electric vehicle manufacturer, to develop a factory of the future. In the factory, machines connect over a 5G network, sending data to a network operations center that powers a digital twin of the factory. The twin is then used to enable just-in-time processes and smart tools that empower human workers with data-driven intelligence.
