Once thought of as a futuristic technology, Digital Twins are now a reality. From factories to airports to oil refineries and more, Digital Twins solve real-world problems by providing a digital view of complex physical environments, empowering key stakeholders to make strategic decisions – in real-time – to improve operational efficiency, safety and security, while reducing cost, waste and redundancy.
As such, the time for organizations to create advanced Digital Twins is now. To get there, they need technology solutions that include the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and edge computing to bring computation and data storage closer to the location where it is actually needed. These technologies are now readily available and can be extensively deployed, further fueling the rise of Digital Twins.
Moreover, the “what if” scenarios of Digital Twins go beyond business operations. Digital Twins can have a real and lasting impact on the environment and even save lives.
How can organizations get started? It is important to partner with a provider offering a comprehensive and unified set of capabilities for Digital Twins, based upon a modern platform that is architected from the ground up to be:
- Real-Time and Event Driven to receive events and analyze them from anywhere, add context from relevant external sources, and pass the information on as it is happening.
- Edge and Cloud-Enabled to deal with time sensitive information and not overload the network. Analytics and AI will run on the edge, which must be dynamically updated in real-time to the current situation and directed as to what actions to take.
- Human-Machine Collaborative to enable humans to control or add value to situations by using their experience, intuition, and ability to generalize.
You can learn how Digital Twin technology is driving digital transformation, and what you need to create digital replicas that can help your organization impact how the world operates by downloading the whitepaper Digital Twins Will Drive the Future of Digital Transformation. There you’ll find an extensive discussion around both the business and technical considerations behind deploying and leveraging Digital Twins.
The whitepaper was published by Vantiq, whose low-code platform is arguably the most mature example of such a platform, designed to enable and simplify the complexity of building Digital Twins. Far beyond experimentation, Vantiq works with market leaders like Ford and Softbank to develop Digital Twin applications that can solve complex operating problems and create new revenue streams.
Digital Twin technology is here today, and will continue to grow as it leverages advances such as the exponential growth in sensors, edge computing, and AI, combined with faster networks (5G). And as more organizations turn to Digital Twins to change and improve how people live and work, they will take on a much larger and more powerful role in business operations.
And best of all, this kind of Digital Twins will dramatically improve the world, not take it over (we’ll leave you to worry about the other kind on your own).