• DIGITAL TWIN

Digital Twin: Transforming How We Make Sense of Data

Learn why digital twin is a strategic imperative for digital transformation.

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What Is Digital Twin?

A digital twin is a virtual representation of a physical product, process, person, or place that can understand and predict its physical counterparts. A digital twin has three components: a digital definition of its counterpart (generated from CAD, PLM, etc.), operational/experiential data of its counterpart (gathered from Internet of Things data, real-world telemetry, and beyond), and an information model (dashboards, HMIs, and more) that correlates and presents the data to drive decision making.

Types of Digital Twins

Digital twins come in many forms and varying complexities, but can be distilled across four physical areas:

 

Product

Captures product lifecycle from origin through operating in customer’s end environment and decommissioning.

Process

Representations of manufacturing operations and production activities to create products and services.

People

Deliver task information to workers and/or capture data to improve process efficiency.

Places

Virtualize a place—like a factory or workstation—to gain insight into the complex workings within the environment and engage with it.


What Can Digital Twin Do?

Digital Twin to Improve Service and Uptime

With PTC as a partner, Howden is using technologies like augmented reality and IoT to demonstrate the power of immersive experiences. One of Howden’s goals is to use digital twin technology to reduce business risk for their customers by improving the uptime of deployed products.

See How it Works

Digital Twin of Place, Process, and People

The emerging technologies of spatial computing and analytics are enabling a digital twin of place. With both a bird’s eye and detailed view of a factory floor enabled by integrating multiple sets of data, spatial analysis offers visibility into movements within a space, and can make data-driven recommendations on how to improve processes and performance. See how in this video from the PTC Reality Lab.

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Digital twin deep dive Digital twin deep dive

Dive Deeper With Digital Twin

As industrial enterprises generate increasing volumes of data about the physical world, they are mapping this data back to the IT systems that define their products, processes, people, and places to enhance the digital thread. Digital twins are quickly proving to be a key strategic accelerator for digital transformation, unlocking the value within the data created by the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and augmented reality (AR).

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Digital Twin Primer Use Cases

Applications of Digital Twin

The applications with digital twin are still emerging. With the technology comes the capability for real-time feedback – and even predictive monitoring and insights. This has the potential to expose new revenue opportunities, such as enhanced service delivery. Outcomes of these use cases are increased customer satisfaction and loyalty, driven by improved asset uptime, and faster time-to-resolution.

As we examine all the opportunities for PTC and our customers, there are three distinct areas where digital twin will make a difference: Engineering, Manufacturing, and Maintenance and Service. Explore each area in more detail below.

Engineering
Manufacturing
Service

Engineering

In engineering, digital twin technology provides a product lens that enables teams to better understand how products are being used in the field and then use that data to build better products. Through this closed-loop design process, engineering organizations optimize product form, fit and function, as well as quality far beyond what can be achieved when relying on static specification documents. 

 Leveraging a digital model and simulation tools, they can validate performance well before—and in some cases in lieu of—physical prototyping, reducing costly late-stage redesign and accelerating time-to-market.

Manufacturing

Digital twin applications for manufacturing continue to grow, benefiting all levels of manufacturing operations. Particularly with process-based digital twins, businesses gain production visibility and planning, which improves operational agility, increases throughput, and optimizes process efficiency throughout the supply chain.

Specific use cases include production monitoring, asset monitoring and machine diagnostics, supporting visual work instructions, predictive maintenance, shop floor performance improvement, process optimization, and more.

Service

To support maintenance and service teams, digital twins are being used to enhance service delivery and offerings that improve customer satisfaction through increased uptime and faster time-to-resolution. Teams are leveraging it for service parts identification and fulfillment, visual procedure guidance/verification for frontline workers, remote monitoring, and predictive service and maintenance.

What Are the Benefits of Digital Twin Technology?

Industrial companies are starting to scratch the surface of digital twin benefits. Below is a round-up of potential benefits across use cases.

  1. Enhance supply chain agility and resilience 

  2. Reduce product time to market 

  3. Enable new business models (i.e., product as a service) 

  4. Increase customer satisfaction 

  5. Improve product quality

  6. Drive operational efficiency 

  7. Improve productivity

  8. Inform sustainability efforts

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