Magic Happens When You Marry Digital Twin and IoT

Digital Twin Use Cases

With increasing popularity, many industries are using digital twins to help in maintenance operations. For instance, aircraft engines, trains, turbines, and offshore oil platforms can be designed and tested digitally before being manufactured physically. To that end, a digital twin is being used in the following industries:

• Automotive:Since cars are already fitted with telemetry sensors, using this technology helps with designing, testing, and validating complex and critical components.
• Healthcare: The healthcare industry engages digital twins for profiling patients. Many have built band-aid-sized sensors that send health-related information back to a monitor and predict a patient’s well-being.
• Manufacturing: The applicability of digital twins in the manufacturing sector is beyond immense since almost every process, like designing and testing across different manufacturing stages, can be simulated.

What Is IoT?

Gartner defines the Internet of Things (IoT) as “the network of physical objects that contain embedded technology to communicate and sense or interact with their internal states or the external environment.”

As it stands, around 13 billion connected IoT devices exist today. And Statista expects this number to grow to 29 billion by 2030. Owing to these, digital systems can record, monitor, and adjust all the interactions between connected things.

IoT Use Cases

Here are some of the popular applications of IoT:

• Increasing manufacturing efficiency through machine monitoring and product-quality monitoring
• Increasing safety and security of transportation systems through vehicle-to-vehicle communication
• Creating smart infrastructure for cities like smart parking garages, smart traffic lights, and street lights
• Endowing residences with remote control – like adjusting the temperature of ACs, controlling water heaters, and regulating lighting

Various industries like manufacturing, automotive, transportation, logistics, retail, healthcare, and more use IoT to make work processes easy.

Digital Twin & IoT

A host of data-producing IoT devices work to amass a lot of information on the physical objects that are being monitored. When implementing a digital twin in the IoT landscape, this process is streamlined to a great extent. That’s because the digital twin becomes the destination for data coming from the IoT network. Now, this opens avenues for analyzing and using the data more efficiently.

Here, it’s worth noting that a digital twin becomes a data repository – more so a single source of truth for the whole network. It becomes the go-to source of real-time data that can be used for simulation and decision-making to help improve production. Here’s how the benefits are realized:

Visibility Into the Full Product Lifecycle

Of course, the prime benefit of combining digital twins and IoT is the improved visibility into the full product lifecycle. The data-producing sensors monitor and record different aspects of a product’s performance. And with data being readily accessible via the digital twin, the business is empowered to perform continuous monitoring of equipment and infrastructure.

Besides, implementing digital twins makes change management in manufacturing and service processes easier with lower rework time.

Profound Operational Intelligence

IoT unlocks all the unknown insights and threads them with a real-time and historical system of records. Consider this; with the help of a process lens, IoT helps drive manufacturing KPIs. For example, it becomes relatively straightforward to improve the uptime of a single asset on a factory floor with the help of IoT-driven insights that can improve the results.

At the same time, a twin of a production line can reduce the difficulties through enhanced operational visibility. This nurtures a better understanding of the production processes that’s vital for continuous improvement.

The Bottom Line

With the increasing popularity of IoT and increasing sophistication of the business landscape, many industries have started implementing digital twins. As seen above, IoT and digital twins form the backbones of workplace management systems that enhance the operations.

Without digital twins, IoT will involve complex networking between points of data origin and data use. Just like a workplace brings the entire company together, a digital twin centralizes the data of the connected devices for real-time analytics and process/product improvement.