Imagine you are an engineer tasked with overseeing the operation of several massive turbines. The turbines are located in a power plant in California, but you work from an office closer to your home in Columbus, Ohio, some 2,500 miles east. Your employer has provided you with software and a virtual reality headset. Using both, you literally talk to your turbines every morning. They describe via words and images what is running well and what is not, provide data on their operation and suggest some potential changes you could make that might bring increased efficiencies in coming years.

A few short years ago, this scenario would have read like science fiction. But the concept of digital twinning — creating a fully functional digital copy of a physical machine — is increasingly becoming a reality for cutting-edge manufacturers.

The details around digital twin technology are easier to show than to tell. A 2016 GE Digital video provides a live demonstration of a human interacting with a digitally twinned turbine, and explains how the twin can help predict and mitigate damage and inefficiencies well before they result in costly repairs and downtime. As the video shows, pairing the physical and virtual through a complex network of sensors and free data exchange allows seamless understanding and manipulation of both entities at once.

The benefits of digital twins are fairly obvious to pick out. Interacting with large and complex machines on a digital level allows engineers to tweak parts and processes long before they break down or cause problems. Digital twinning also creates a data trail that engineers can follow in the event of a problem. Engineers can also use these trails or “traces” to design better, more efficient machines in the future.

While digital twins could benefit manufacturing operations in any industry, a few stick out as especially pertinent.

Aerospace

The digital twin concept was essentially born in the aerospace industry. Aircraft of any size are incredibly complex machines. A Boeing 737 consists of over 350,000 parts sourced by hundreds of different suppliers. Digital twinning helps manage the aircraft engineering process by creating data traces to track the development of individual parts, aggregate sensor data to improve the safety and efficiency of an aircraft and more.

Figure 1: Aircraft engines like this one have thousands of individual components. A digital twin of the engine can help track each component’s supplier and ensure a manufacturer’s engines are running efficiently and safely in the field. Source: David Monniaux / CC BY-SA 3.0Manufacturers in the aerospace industry remain some of the most active in digital twin interest and development. Accenture’s Digital Thread Survey found that aerospace and defense companies are understandably inundated with data, and that 97% of aerospace manufacturers were actively using or evaluating digital twin or digital thread technologies in 2017.

Automotive

Like aircraft, modern vehicles collect and transmit enormous amounts of data, all of which can be aggregated and used to improve future iterations. Manufacturers can feed data about cruise control effectiveness, braking and speed into an internet of things (IoT) system to drive engineering requirements and build a better vehicle through a continuously evolving digital twin. For autonomous vehicles, which collect even more data than their traditional counterparts, this “continuous engineering” process is even more crucial.

Custom products

In industries that involve highly customized, complex products, digital twins can make it easier for manufacturers to integrate customer preferences and demands into the future engineering process. Customers have long been able to digitally configure a product, but capturing and analyzing those choices and creating digital twins allows suppliers to allocate resources to options that are most important to customers.

If these custom products are receptive to sensors and other means for capturing usage data, suppliers can also take stock of how customized configurations affect product performance. These metrics can allow manufacturers to refine their custom options even further.

More to come

As digital twins become more widespread, their uses will only become more exciting and game-changing. As an integral part of Industry 4.0 implementations, twins are poised to help revolutionize manufacturing.