- On December 17th, 1903, the Wright Brothers succeeded
in flying the first power-driven heavier-than-air aircraft.
It flew for 59 seconds at 852 feet.
To achieve this historic milestone,
they researched and developed lots of different designs,
built them, and then ran a test.
When each failed, they went away,
figured out what was wrong, corrected it,
and then tried again.
They used the data from each failure to inform their design.
This was time intensive and expensive work.
Innovation and invention for most of human history
has followed this process.
Later of course, we became better at developing models,
typically small or simpler representations,
before building the full product.
But still, without the ability to fully simulate
real conditions, a decent amount of uncertainty remains
until the full build was complete and in operation.
For most of the history of product development,
there's a scrap heap of failures
that eventually may have produced a quality product
after many iterations.
Thomas Edison is famous for saying,
"I have not failed.
"I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
The practices and technologies to be able
to better simulate physical products
before being built and also during post-build operations
began in earnest in the 1960s.
Notably, the US Space program under NASA
widely adopted this approach out of necessity.
First, by innovating around better simulations
prior to build for both equipment and people,
and then by being able to replicate space conditions
during operations on the ground.
By building a physical twin and using data available
from the real spacecraft, engineers on the ground
could work through scenarios.
As the information technology revolution began
around the same time, computers became better platforms
for simulating the real world.
Better processing power and more storage capacity
enabled improvements and better capabilities.
In particular, computer aided design or CAD,
empowered engineers to more easily render variations
of designs and later emulate actual operations
right on the screen.
Through the 1980s and onward, digitalization
was groundbreaking in design and manufacturing
and quickly propelled innovation and quality
in engineering to completely new levels.
During the late 1990s, Dr. Michael Grieves,
a researcher at Case Western Reserve University,
began to coalesce a set of ideas
and growing practices regarding design and simulation
of a product that he termed the doubleganger.
He is credited with being the first to describe in detail
the concept of the digital twin.
He framed it in the context
of product lifecycle management, or PLM.
This included not only the design and simulation,
but the use of digital tools and data in the manufacture,
operations, maintenance, and final disposal of the product.
The term digital twin was not yet in use,
and Dr. Grieves used the term information mirroring
to represent the exchange of data
between the virtual design and the physical object
in each stage of the product life cycle.
From the 1990s onward, and particularly into the 2000s,
computing performance and capability grew rapidly,
as did telecommunications and computer visualization.
The ability to create virtual objects
and simulate them under a variety of realistic conditions
to build them and harvest data from the real world
into the virtual object, and then to maintain
and operate a physical object
through an entirely virtual interface all became viable.
The true value of a digital twin
was beginning to be realized.
A new era of design, manufacturing,
and operations had begun.