The Digital Twin in Action and Directions for the Future

Abstract

The Digital Twin is crucial and timely for positively affecting how we work, live, and play. It eliminates the gap between experimentation and learning by bridging real and virtual worlds in a powerful methodology, making significant headway in conquering previously unsolvable problems and challenges. Digital Twins are made possible by four widely deployed infrastructures for connectivity and communications, computing, digital storage, and sources of digital data. The Digital Twin provides insights, paths to innovation, efficient production of goods, improved delivery of services, better experiences and entertainment, and new business models. Investing in Digital Twins is one of the most valuable ways to create sustainable paths to the future. While Digital Twins bring concrete value today for a wide assortment of applications in different vertical domains today they are still in the early stages of evolution. The considerations in the future of Digital Twins are the business cases and models that accompany Digital Twins, the mind set of the management, engineers and technologists, the development for ecosystems in individual industries, and finally the trust of end-use beneficiaries. Digital Twins can be simple, but more than likely, where they bring transformative value they will be complex technologically and will require significant changes in organizational structures to be successful. From what we have learned it is consequently important to understand that the commitment of an enterprise or a business to adopt Digital Twins as a methodology is a journey. It includes incentives for those involved, the development of human capabilities, significant acquisition of tools and infrastructure, the maturation of processes across the enterprise or business, and integration with a supporting ecosystem. The Digital Twin book is the most comprehensive work on the subject to date. It has brought together top practitioners, technical experts, analysts, and academics to explore and discuss the concept of the Digital Twin, its history, evolution, and the profound impact across sectors of the global economy. The book addresses the business value, technological underpinnings, lessons learned from implementations, resources for success, practical approaches for implementation, and illustrative use cases. It makes the case for why we believe that Digital Twins will fundamentally transform major industries and enable us to fulfill important societal goals.