Demystifying ‘Digital Twins’

Digital Twins evoke many emotions ranging from excitement to frustration. Why? The term can mean many things, and therefore causes much confusion unless everyone in the conversation knows exactly what is being described.

Abit like the term ‘Asset’. An Asset is something of value either financial or physical. And in either case can mean a vast plethora of very different things. A financial asset can mean a brand, goodwill, cash, receivables, inventory, stocks, bonds and so on. A physical asset can mean a vehicle, a building, a piece of equipment like a pump, furniture and so on.

Just imagine a conversation involving the term ‘Asset’ without properly qualifying what it is between parties from very different domains. I suspect the conversation will not last too long!

The term Digital Twin has a similar problem as it can apply to products, systems and processes, which could be virtually anything across many industry segments. Different types of assets in the built environment, an energy grid system, manufactured products, and a manufacturing process, are just some examples. And within each of those industry segments, Digital Twins can mean any number of specific solutions that target specific use cases.

So what must we do as an industry to alleviate the confusion relating to Digital Twins in the Built Environment?

1. Recognize that Digital Twin is a ubiquitous term to describe a vast array of solutions that may sit within any stage of a project’s lifecycle (planning, design, construction, commissioning, operations).

2. Remove bias by not having a constrained view of what a Digital Twin is, based on one’s own area of expertise / exposure.

3. Recognise that Digital Twins can either be pre-baked ‘products’ (think of it as a square peg of a certain size that will fit into a square hole of the same size), or customised solutions that are composed to address vast array of use cases.

4. Distinguish between the adjacent but distinct concepts of ‘twinning’ (creating the world model) and ‘twin enabled solutions’ (use case driven solutions that leverage and extend the world model).

5. Recognise that the expertise for ‘twinning’, and expertise to build ‘twin enabled solutions’ may come from very different firms, across various phases of the asset’s lifecycle.

If the world model is tightly coupled to a set of pre baked features (typical of a Digital Twin ‘product’), the investment in ‘twinning’ cannot be leveraged in full. It would be best to leverage a Digital Twin Platform that decouples the world model, and makes it available for many twin enabled solutions.