- A digital twin offers remarkable benefits
during the operational and maintenance phases
of product lifecycle management, or PLM.
Like the build or manufacturing phase,
virtual and dynamic replicas exist
to mirror real physical objects.
In operations, these specific types of digital twins
are known as an emulation twin,
or the more popular term, supervisory twin.
I'll use the latter going forward.
A supervisory twin
supports three core operational processes.
Supervisory,
diagnostic and control,
and predictive.
Let's discuss each of these in turn.
The supervisory capability means that the digital twin
is accurately replicating and illustrating the behavior
of the physical object.
For example, if a part is spinning
it will show either through data or graphical visualization
the dimensions of the spin, such as position, speed
and temperature.
The digital twin will produce,
dependent on an array of sensors in the actual device,
static and dynamic characteristics in real time.
This data is often presented alongside
performance expectations.
The diagnostic and control capabilities
enable analysis of performance in real time.
Remember, the objective of operations
is to ensure that products, machines or systems
are working at an optimum level.
Insights gleaned from analysis
can help improve physical asset and process performance,
reduce risk and better manage costs.
With real time data being fed
to the supervisory digital twin,
this data can in turn be fed to analytical systems.
These systems enable automatic alerts,
say, when parameter thresholds are exceeded.
The can diagnose issues that either already exist,
or in some instances, anticipate issues in the future.
Some can also identify performance improvements.
In certain environments with prerequisite infrastructure,
needed improvements can be pushed and executed
digitally directly from the digital twin.
Coupled with digital twins in the build phase,
diagnostic and control capabilities
can be integrated into systems
that support asset performance management, or APM.
APM synchronizes information from a variety of sources
in product lifecycle management
in order to provide a comprehensive view
of production and asset performance.
This cross-functional visibility can improve productivity,
reliability, safety, quality and return on assets.
Finally, the predictive capability of a digital twin
helps to discover new opportunities
beyond improving performance.
Predictive simulation software
that works in conjunction with a supervisory digital twin
can be used to run future scenarios.
Stakeholders can learn the results of what-if simulations.
These can be used to inform decisions
without any of the risk or cost of making changes
to the physical counterpart.
Positive outcomes from predictive capabilities
can be used for investment decisions,
for both processes and systems.
These operational and maintenance capabilities
are creating game-changing opportunities
across many domains in the economy.