The interview
Digital twins: science fiction to science fact Jonathan Eyre tells Chloe Rothenburg about the AMRC’s ‘gold standard’ work on digital twins, its purpose, importance to industry and what the future holds. The concept of a digital twin has been in practice for the past few decades, but it wasn’t until 1998 that the phrase was first mentioned – which referred to a digital counterpart of American Emmy-winning actor Alan Alda’s voice. In the manufacturing world, discussions around digital twins began in literature in 2005, when the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) wrote an article on ‘The web of augmented physical objects’. However, Jonathan Eyre, senior technical fellow for digital twins at the AMRC, says it has only been within the last five years that people have really started to exploit digital twins and what they can enable, due to developments in concepts such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and the cloud that has made them achievable. “Digital twins are about observing the world we live in by synchronising it with digital representations to enable datadriven decisions,” says Eyre, who is coming
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up to having almost a decade of AMRC experience under his belt. “It is more than just a computer-aided design model or a simulation – digital twins are an approach to better understand what actual assets and processes are doing to be able to change and improve their implementations. “Some descriptions present digital twins as assimilating data into dashboards; however, this is just a starting point. Having the ability to predict and have remote control would be a further advancement, but we need to set expectations even higher towards integrating digital twins to other such twins across supply chains and other organisations, referred to as federated digital twins.” For Jonathan, it was the element of problem solving that got him fired up about a career in engineering. He studied
Jonathan Eyre, senior technical fellow for digital twins at the AMRC.