Digital Twins Enhance Decisions But Only With the Right Context
Evgeny Fedotov, senior vice president and head of EMEA at AVEVA, shares five key benefits of using digital twins and how they can help drive value.
From new revenue streams to sustainability gains, digital twins support decision-making across various use cases. But what context is needed to make digital twins a reality, and how can the technology really add value to your organization? AVEVA’s Evgeny Fedotov dives into the details.
Imagine holding up a mirror to every conceivable process within an industrial plant and collating all that information within a single window. In extremely simple terms, that’s what a digital twin is capable of.
Digital twins are broadly defined as real-time virtual representations of physical assets – whether they are factories, power plants or even entire cities. By visualizing the asset in its entirety, a digital twin provides an understanding of the asset’s state and its ability to respond to changes. When this asset data is combined with additional analytics – typically using artificial intelligence and machine learning – it helps add value to business operations.
The US space agency NASA (national aeronautics and space administration) was among the earliest users of a digital twin. The failure of the Apollo 13 spacecraft led NASA engineers to add a digital dimension to their physical models to understand events that led to the accident and prevent similar occurrences in the future.
More than 50 years later, digital twins now use advanced technologies such as the industrial internet of things (IIOT), virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) to deliver real-world gains. From oil and gas to the casting of auto parts and wastewater treatment, digital twins are used across the industrial economy in many different ways. Gartner estimates that the aggregate market size for digital twins will cross $183 billion in revenue by 2026, with composite digital twins presenting the largest investment.
That volume growth is a result of the way digital twins support decision-making, unlock value gains and deliver sustainability benefits. Digital twins deliver a return on investment in many ways.
Streamline Project Execution
The process of executing a new project carries several challenges, many of which only become apparent during the construction phase. With a digital twin, users can assemble a project virtually and share it with colleagues and partners before creating it physically. This process enables engineers to identify and fix potential failures well in advance – leading to lower costs, less rework and minimal resource use.
Aker Carbon Capture uses a digital twin as the base of its unified engineering approach to create efficient and replicable designs for the facilities it builds for carbon-intensive-industry customers. By integrating all its process simulation and engineering (1D, 2D and 3D) data into a single data-centric hub in the cloud, the Norway-headquartered company slashed the cost of its medium-sized offerings by 90%, improved operational efficiency through collaboration in the cloud, and reduced time to market by over 50%.
See More: Digital Twins: a New Real-Time Data Analytics Technique that Boosts Disaster Response
Optimize Value Chain Efficiency
Digital twins can optimize production lines and deliver efficiency gains when existing assets are replicated. Extended across a company’s operations, such organizational digital twins optimize for higher, business-level outcomes.
Taking the unified, single-window view concept further is ADNOC, the oil and gas leader based out of Abu Dhabi. In line with its view that digital strategies are an extension of business needs, ADNOC uses its Panorama Digital Command Centre to gain a unified, integrated, and real-time visualization of operational key performance indicators across its installations. With the help of 10 million tags and 120 dashboards, operators can view the performance of all assets within the ADNOC network – at one glance. The project has helped drive savings estimated between $60-$100 million.
Create New Revenue Streams
In an increasingly competitive global marketplace, manufacturers must find new ways to differentiate themselves from the competition and stay abreast of customer demands. Besides speeding up product design, digital twins can also augment service delivery, providing new revenue streams in the process.
Italpresse Gauss, a builder of machines and automatic work cells for light alloy casting in the global automotive industry, overlays a digital twin with AR and VR layers so customers can view and resolve asset problems virtually – from a tablet device anywhere in the world. The discrete digital twin solution also connects the OEM with customers by adding interactive remote support for maintenance engineers and operators in training. The concept’s success has prompted Italpresse Gauss to invest more than 50% of its research and development budget in enhancing its machines with the new software.
Connect the Hybrid Workspace
The pandemic demonstrated how remote workforces could maintain business continuity, presenting new ways to streamline value chains and rationalize costs. Because digital twins reproduce real-world assets in 3D, organizational silos can be broken, and broken remote workers obtain a connected view of project and asset information. Overall, teams benefit from highly efficient and effective decision support capability for capital projects and operations environments.
Norway-based Lundin, which builds and operates offshore rigs in the North Sea, has been able to move a significant portion of its workforce away from onsite locations with a 3D visualization solution that presents asset information on one screen. Using this composite digital twin, operators can now view the different parts of a plant and plan and schedule tasks from the comfort and safety of their offices – or homes. Their onsite colleagues can then execute these jobs more quickly.
Deliver Sustainable Outcomes
As industrial enterprises work to achieve their net-zero goals, digital twins are being leveraged to deliver sustainability gains in both greenfield and brownfield assets. Unified insight, founded on a digital twin, can offer engineering teams a limitless range of operating scenarios to reduce emissions and optimize risk.
Veolia Water Technologies, a French transnational utility, implemented a next-generation, cloud-based engineering platform to drive business agility and collaboration across 260 accounts on five continents. The unified engineering solution has helped engineers enhance operational insight and improve process efficiency. An immediate result was a 20% improvement in IT agility. Veolia’s teams can now harness their collective expertise with unified data to identify resource efficiency and energy savings opportunities while fostering innovation and sustainability.
Digital Twins Have Never Been More Important
As we have seen, digital twins can support a wide range of use cases depending on how they are deployed. They play a central role in uncovering opportunities to unlock business ingenuity while driving efficiency and environmental gains. These are essential goals for companies looking to deliver resilient and sustainable growth in a net-zero economy.
Yet, for the most part, current industry applications focus on replicating single – or discrete – use cases within a digital twin, such as engineering, maintenance or operations. When those views are combined into a single, unified interface, this integrated, organizational digital twin can drive significantly greater value gains. Put another way, if business leaders are able to see all the different factors that shape their business within one model, they might make a very different decision – with a very different business impact. Context, it has been said, is everything.
What’s your take on leveraging digital twin technology? Will your organization benefit from its benefits? Share with us on Facebook, X, and LinkedIn. We’d love to hear from you!
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