A child creates an avatar with FITUR. HELIXA Experience Center is a technical and artistic installation at the heart of the FITUR fair. It’s the first time we offer visitors the opportunity to create their own avatar in real time. This avatar is a personalized, surreal 3D #seriezero digital twin that can be used to interact on digital platforms and the metaverse.
Guillermo Gutierrez Carrascal | Lightrocket | Getty Images
The idea of digital twins (digital representations of physical systems, products, or processes that act as indistinguishable counterparts for purposes such as simulation, testing, monitoring, and maintenance) has been around for some time. However, it does indicate that the time has come for this concept to be more widely adopted to support business applications.
“The rapid adoption of digital twins is giving rise to two categories of practical applications: industry-specific use cases that solve very specific challenges, and industry-specific use cases that support broader strategy and decision-making. It’s an out-of-the-box use case,” said Frank Diana, principal futurist at Tata Consultancy Services.
Like artificial intelligence a few years ago, digital twin technology has moved from a very specific application to a broad management best practice, Diana said.
Matt Barrington, Emerging Technology Leader at consulting firm EY Americas, said:
“For example, this will allow more organizations to confidently experiment with access-based service models for complex products and new database services,” Barrington said. “We expect all companies to become enabled and dependent to move forward in a more dynamic and ecosystem-oriented marketplace. [on] It’s a digital twin to intelligently operate most aspects of the business,” he said.
Bring to life with real-time data
According to Barrington, companies are using virtual product development twins to accelerate design and development cycles more effectively. “Digital twins take the models you already have for today’s products, processes, and systems and use real-world data to bring them to life in real time,” he said.
According to Diana, one practical application of the digital twin within TCS was to guide the company’s return-to-office strategy during the late stages of the pandemic. “We needed to know the answers to how many questions to effectively reopen [workers] Could I get infected? Who do we need to test and when? What should be the capacity of our quarantine facility?” he said.
To answer these questions, TCS has created a digital twin environment with a new machine-processable “locality model” with the primary aim of predicting and controlling the spread of Covid. “The digital twin will act as a quantitative aid to explain the current state of the environment and aid decision-making, allowing employees to return to the office safely and effectively,” she said. says.
According to Diana, digital twins are also replacing data-driven models of the past used for business strategy. “These traditional strategic platforms lack the ability to account for the deviations and disruptions that are becoming increasingly common in the post-Covid world.
Along with AI, organizations can use digital twins to help conceive, experiment, and execute business decisions through simulators that represent key business entities, interactions, and external forces such as competitors and natural disasters. says Diana.
In the life sciences, digital twins are being used to create twins of human organs, enabling new approaches to medical research and medicine, Diana said. Pharmaceutical and cosmetic companies could use the twins to test ways to deliver new drugs and products to human skin in cyberspace instead of relying on animal testing, he said. to find new surgeries and treatments for heart disease.
smarter city
Digital twins are also being used in smart city initiatives, according to Diana. For example, Los Angeles employs digital twin technology to model the movements and activities of transportation such as ride-sharing and autonomous drones to better plan its mobility infrastructure.
Another possible application is environmental, social and governance initiatives. Dan Versace, a research analyst for his ESG business services at research firm International Data Corporation, said the technology “leversages massive datasets of historical weather, travel, and physical infrastructure data to provide insight into physical locations. Create a digital twin.” Learning, digital twinning can perform in-depth analysis to provide users with in-depth, scenario-based assessments of environmental conditions, Versace said.
“Appropriately applied, this technology can provide insight into the physical risks associated with an increase in climate-related natural disasters,” said Versace. “In the next year, this technology will only extend its capabilities, and some organizations will be able to explain not only the direct risks they face from climate change, but also the impact these disasters have on their customers and customers. We insist on value chain.”
This will allow businesses to develop resilience plans and reconciliation strategies long before they are needed without exposing them to significant risk, Versace said.
“In 2023, we will see rapid adoption of digital twins across industries,” says Diana. “This year’s volatility and uncertainty will act as a catalyst for companies to put themselves in rehearsal mode for an uncertain future. Digital twins will be a key tool for that rehearsal.”
According to Barrington, digital twins are gaining momentum in adoption and refinement as more organizations see positive results from early adopters. As digital twins become mainstream, EY predicts two major trends. The first is hyper-personalization, which aims to use twins to better align products, services, and experiences to increase customer loyalty and value.
Another is a dynamic supply chain. “As more twins of critical assets and processes come online, leaders are leveraging digital twins to not only model and simulate their supply chains, but to optimize dynamic and intelligent supply chain models. and automation, all coordinated by the digital twin,” said Barrington. “Many leaders have learned from the recent pandemic that static, linear supply chains are not enough to move forward, and digital twins are one of the best ways to remove risk, he said.”
