Digital Twins

Digital twins are digital representations of a complex system. While in much of media about digital twins we see this in reference to digital re-creating a 3d space, a digital twin can be much more. We break Digital Twins into several categories: Logical Twin, Functional Twin, Physical Twin and Operational Twin. Read below for more in depth information on Digital Twins and how they provide value for your business.

What does your system need to do? This is taking a look at a tool-agnostic approach to help determine what the system should look like based on behaviors the system needs to exhibit. This helps us be able to test, ensure we’ve met the requirements and modularize functionality to ensure if we make any changes to the system we have all the system behaviors covered.

How does your system do it? Start applying tools to the logical approach. What tools solve what problems and how do they do it? For each tool you can apply parameters to the inputs and outputs to help measure the effectiveness of design choices, and be able to objectively weigh the costs and benefits of changes.

This is the modeling of the system in 3D space to represent how it will look in reality. Cars, aircraft, factories and more can benefit from having a digital twin of their product for identifying problems for example transportation routing within a factory, access to components that require maintenance and more. 

If required to maintain all changes within a system as it exists in the real world, you can have an operational twin that tracks all changes and stays as 1 for 1 with current configuration of the system.

Digital twins are used in a few different ways. First, they aid in the design of a system by modeling what the system should do, how it could do it and what it should look like doing it. This helps reduce risk earlier in a program by pushing test of physical products to the left in a schedule. If you’re able to simulate the testing before purchasing expensive hardware, you can iterate without the added expense and time. In addition, end users of the system can provide subjective inputs during the design process to have their needs met earlier on, which provides a lower risk design, and a happier end user. 

If your business would benefit from being able to perform faster and less expensive design iterations, I would suggest building a digital twin.

Modular Flow will not only help you build a digital twin for your system, but we will also create a digital twin of your business. The people, the systems, the processes and everything required to make your business run. By doing this you can find points that introduce risk or hardship and target them for improvement. With a digital twin we can introduce simulation that takes the whole operation into account when trying to decide on making changes such as hiring a new employee, investing more infrastructure or reshaping a process. 

Ready to get started on your next project? We would love to hear from you. Contact us today to schedule a consultation and see how we can help your business grow.