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Digital twins drive efficiency across machines and infrastructure
Digital twins of machines, facilities and infrastructures will create a portfolio of virtual representations that, in time, will connect to allow city planners and engineers to plan and monitor urban environments from the smallest features to its entirety
The application of digital twins is reaching further across industries, with some of the most interesting recent examples being improving operations of industrial assets and virtualising entire urban infrastructures and smart cities.
Immediate use of digital twins exists in industrial applications, particularly to design and plan machinery – but more comprehensive digital twins enable operators to increase efficacy and efficiency of operations when using industrial equipment and entire facilities.
Manufacturer of marine and energy equipment, Wärtsilä Voyage Services, uses digital twins for training simulations – in fact, the simulators can reconstruct past situations for training purposes. On the customer-facing side, the company employs digital twins for optimising fuel consumption. The twin is the mathematical model of a particular ship system. The twin represents the engine, the hull, or even the power consumption of the hotel on a cruise ship, for instance.
The company uses the representation of the actual ship to model the optimum operation for best results in fuel consumption. Wärtsilä Voyage Services can then compare the result with the actual operations to identify the root causes of excess costs to improve the system. The company uses this approach to provide services to its clients to help them improve their performance when planning efficient voyages.
In facility management, electronics contract manufacturer Foxconn is employing Nvidia’s digital twin to work with a virtual representation of a new factory in Guadalajara, Mexico. The contract manufacturer’s engineers are specifying needed processes and training industrial robots in this digital twin environment.
To place a host of robot arms to ensure an efficient process, the engineers employed thousands of sensors and many video cameras. Young Liu, Foxconn’s chairman, highlights the expectations. “Our digital twin will guide us to new levels of automation and industrial efficiency, saving time, cost and energy,” he said.
Nvidia’s Issac Manipulator supports the process of creating the robot arms’ behaviours with libraries and artificial intelligence (AI) models to leverage the virtual environment to create increasingly efficient real-world processes.
Digital twins facilitate site management
Hitachi Construction Machinery has created a digital twin for construction sites to support progress management and the operation of autonomous machinery. The associated platform creates a real-time virtual representation of the physical construction site that features the location of workers, information about the status of construction machinery, and changes in the construction site’s terrain as a result of the ongoing work. The information allows Hitachi to control machinery remotely via the internet in a safe manner.
Related applications are becoming services that companies offer their customers. Since May 2024, customers of Amazon Web Services (AWS) have been able to use the company’s warehouse automation and optimisation (WAO) service to create efficient fulfilment centres.
In addition, Amazon’s global engineering and security services team supports customers by mapping their exiting warehouses with Lidar scanners to create a 3D representation. Then the team is modelling a digital twin, including the creation of a library of digital assets of representations of real-world objects such as charging stations for forklifts, conveyors and workstations. The digital twin is then used to develop concepts of alternative warehouse layouts.
The US government has also recognised the importance of digital twins in improving entire industries. The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released a Notice of Funding Opportunity seeking proposals “to establish and operate a Chips Manufacturing USA Institute focused on digital twins with integrated physical assets and computational capabilities (digital assets) to tackle important semiconductor-industry manufacturing challenges”.
NIST is anticipating federal funding up to about $285m for a period of up to five years. The institute is intended to create a collaborative environment to drive innovation and support the development of semiconductor digital twins. “The new institute, known as Smart USA (Semiconductor Manufacturing and Advanced Research with Twins USA) will focus on efforts to develop, validate and use digital twins to improve domestic semiconductor design, manufacturing, advanced packaging, assembly, and test processes,” it claims.
Similarly, in October 2024, the US National Science Foundation – in collaboration with the US National Institutes of Health and the US Food and Drug Administration – awarded more than $6m in research funding to investigate the development of digital twins for applications in biomedical research and healthcare.
Digital twins boost infrastructure performance
Digital twins can improve the use and operations of supporting infrastructures of entire regions. For example, Heriot-Watt University and the University of Glasgow are using digital twins in a £46m initiative to investigate how the UK’s transport systems can be decarbonised. The universities will create TransiT Hub, a research facility that will collect real-world data via sensors and feed the information into a digital twin to test various scenarios to reduce carbon emissions.
Meanwhile, Carnegie Mellon University and Fujitsu have used AI to “visualise traffic situations, including people and vehicles, as part of joint research on Social Digital Twin”.
“Social Digital Twin digitally reproduces the relationships and connections between people, goods, the economy and society to offer a simulation, prediction and decision-making environment in which to solve diverse and complex social issues,” they claim.
Such a twin can let users experience changes in city environments, traffic management and many other issues that require complex negotiations among stakeholders to find better solutions and compromises.
In water management, digital twins can provide crucial support, because multiple factors play important roles and real-time monitoring is a significant consideration. An example for the use of virtual treatment plants comes from Trinity River Authority (TRA) of Texas, which covers 18,000 square miles and serves 39 customer cities with safe drinking water.
“Data plays a key part in day-to-day operations of a plant as it provides insights into how the process is going,” says David Naranjo, IT systems and applications developer at TRA.
Read more about digital twins
- Information in the metaverse is A Tale of Two Cities: The metaverse will make it easier to access an increasing wealth of information, but it also will make it more difficult to distinguish real from fake, accurate from wrong – and that goes for information as well as the information sources themselves.
- Virtualising urban environments and smart cities with digital twins: As cities increasingly try to integrate smart features and applications into their operations, digital twins will become powerful enablers in designing and developing smart cities.
- Digital twins to virtualise the world: The industrial metaverse and digital twins are related but are not necessarily the same – so where will digital twins play the most important role?
- Digital twins will change operations with use cases across industries: Digital twins are busily replicating real-world objects, processes and environments in the metaverse. Industrial and commercial applications are manifold, because the use potential of such digital twins is virtually unlimited, but technological, commercial and regulatory hurdles exist.
In the past, workers had to check gauges visually to retrieve data, and such retrieval only occurred if there was a need to acquire data updates. The treatment plant’s data was collected and processed in paper format, which resulted in human errors and storage issues, among other issues.
Design software leader Autodesk’s suite of software enabled TRA to create the digital twin, and to leverage the plant’s data more effectively and efficiently. Challenges of the operations are very specific to the task. Water quality has to be measured and controlled, but other issues add to the demands. Rainfall derived inflow and infiltration (RDII) and ground infiltration models play a role in the design and operations of treatment plants. A digital twin can support both tasks.
“Too often, models are built only for planning purposes, usually to size the pipes and for treatment facilities to handle peak flow during large storms, [but here] treatment plant operators gain more insight into how the system works and [make] it easier for them to make better decisions,” says senior support engineer Mel Meng.
Water management goes well beyond water treatment. Entire regions can benefit by environmental modelling, which will become increasingly necessary as climate change will impact regions across the globe in various ways. Digital twins can help to map potential dangers to take disaster-prevention measures or avoid problematic areas altogether. For example, in Texas, between Austin and San Antonio, is the city of San Marcos. The area is part of the so-called Flash Flood Alley – “one of the most flood-prone regions on the continent”.
This situation is not a new one – the area has been susceptible to floods for millennia – but the region is growing quickly. And with more people, the stakes of disaster-proof construction are raised.
San Marcos could look back to a particularly devastating flood in April 2017 to think about the cause of such flooding and what changes to the infrastructure are necessary to prevent future catastrophes. Consultants used Autodesk’s InfoWorks ICM to model the region. The software enables engineers to model “complex hydraulic and hydrologic network elements quickly and accurately in a collaborative environment”.
Digital twins enable visualisation of urban environments
Allison Emmerson, an archaeologist and associate professor at Tulane University, is working at an excavation project in Pompeii, Italy, which was famously destroyed by Mount Vesuvius almost two millennia ago. She is the director of a collaboration among universities that started in 2021. Pompeii I.14 Project is combining traditional excavation efforts with geospatial technologies to create digital twins of the site.
“Having the digital twin makes it an entirely new ball game,” she says. “It really allows us to go back as if we’re in the excavation.”
Meanwhile, the Vatican and Microsoft have collaborated on generating a virtual representation of St Peter’s Basilica via AI. Some 400,000 digital photos were used to create the digital twin. “It is literally one of the most technologically advanced and sophisticated projects of its kind that has ever been pursued,” says Microsoft president Brad Smith.
Both projects are recent examples of the use of digital twins for preserving and recreating historical buildings and cultural objects.
Creating digital twins is getting easier and less costly as applications proliferate. Recreating cultural and historical artefacts and environments will become a widespread practice, engendering immersive research, education and entertainment applications in the process.
Martin Schwirn is the author of Small data, big disruptions: How to spot signals of change and manage uncertainty (ISBN 9781632651921). He is also senior advisor for strategic foresight at Business Finland, helping startups and incumbents to find their position in tomorrow’s marketplace.
