Technology makes it possible to create perfect copies of processes and physical items: clones that are fed information to monitor their every step.
Digital twins perform very similar work in different economic sectors: they monitor the status of the original they are replicating; they predict behaviour; they anticipate failures or errors that may occur in the immediate future; they correct unforeseen events on the fly; they experiment with new functions or new scenarios in a virtual world without taking any risk in the physical one; and they test changes before they are implemented in the real environment.
In an interview with the ABC newspaper on Industry 4.0, Diego Galar, TECNALIA’s scientific head of Reliability and Maintenance, explained that “The IIoT (Industrial Internet of Things) allows us to have cheaper temperature sensors, vibration sensors, ultrasound sensors, laser cameras, etc. that collect data and transmit it at a very low cost via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. With 5G there will be more sensors at a lower cost and more data. And cloud computing has allowed us to upload a tremendous amount of data and models with faster processing. It's like having a crystal ball”.
The real revolution is yet to come, and it will occur “when these digital twins interact with each other without human intervention, when they create their own social networks of machines and are able to share relevant data and events with each other. In a company with 4,000 robots, they could learn collaboratively. And they will make their own decisions”.
Industry can make good use of digital twin technology . “To be competitive, we need to have an automated and flexible industry that allows us to manufacture without failures, breakdowns or stoppages. Industry has to change to short production runs and adapt to the times and to reality. 12-year old cars can no longer be found on the market.. Now they last two or three years”, Galar explained. And incorporating digital twins would be a great help in providing that flexibility.
Further information
If you would like to know more about digital twins and their application for operation and maintenance in industrial environments, you should watch the webinar given by Diego Galar where he shows us the keys to digital twins.
