Digital Twinning and Extended Reality Convergence

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More and more organizations have use cases for digital twinning. Adding augmented reality and virtual reality only increases that justification.

In a nutshell, digital twinning is the strategy of making a highly realistic model of a tool, system, process or product to make use of for development, testing and validation. Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) come into play as well. For example, AR can show a digital twin on top of a physical machine and supply information a technician would not otherwise see, and technologists can enter the VR of a digital twin to simulate various issues.

Many folks associate the usage of digital twins solely with manufacturing. While it’s true that manufacturing has pioneered the usage of digital twinning, use cases exist in every industry. Additionally, there are digital twinning use cases in cross-industry applications corresponding to infrastructure and automation.

To higher understand the potential uses of digital twinning, AR and VR, take a take a look at the use cases in a handful of industries.

Manufacturing

Aerospace, automotive and general-purpose manufacturing firms use digital twins as a part of overall product development. Here are some common uses:

• creating design mock-ups to indicate how a finished product will work;
• fine-tuning product features and capabilities;
• defining requirements to supply guidance to component suppliers on component specifications, corresponding to bolt size, shape and strength;
• testing and quality assurance;
• creating customer-requested modifications and other design personalization;
• creating operational and performance optimization; and
• predicting future failure modes so maintenance may be preemptively scheduled, and executing on other predictive maintenance goals.

Healthcare, retail and other human-centric industries

Companies that interact with customers may also profit from digital twinning, which enables them to optimize patient care and customer support. Some examples include the next:

• improving operational efficiency, corresponding to using digital twinning to optimize the flow of patients or customers through a facility;
• improving user experience through the use of AR and VR focus groups to check how customers or patients experience a physical facility;
• improving layout and design of facilities; and
• refining services and products for optimal appeal to customers and patients.

Supply chain and logistics industry

Companies which are heavily reliant on their supply chain or logistics functions can see particular advantages from digital twinning. Examples include the next:

• pre-testing the performance of packaging and packaging materials;
• optimizing routes and delivery processes; and
• improving handoffs between stages in a supply chain.

General applications of digital twins, AR and VR

One often-overlooked use case for digital twins, AR and VR applies to almost every industry: infrastructure performance and automation.

Digital twins of routers, servers, storage appliances and virtual machines can function testing grounds to explore performance or security vulnerabilities. The same goes for testing automated processes.

For example, for instance a corporation is rolling out a brand new automated process for operating system updates and patch management for infrastructure devices. Network engineers can program the automation tool to roll out the update process on the twinned environment first. In this manner, they will gather configuration and performance data and share that with technology operations specialists who can revise the method if it leads to unexpected impacts.

Facilities and technology professionals may also use digital twinning to model the physical environments of systems and appliances. For example, if a corporation is constructing out its own data center, a digital twin can model power, heating and cooling systems against rack layout. Facilities professionals can use this to ascertain for decent spots and be certain that that each one control panels are easily accessible by facility personnel.

While it’s true that manufacturing has pioneered the usage of digital twinning, use cases exist in every industry.

Finally, organizations can use the digital twin to optimize human operational processes, corresponding to mapping how technicians walk through the info center.

While these applications could appear futuristic, enterprise organizations are deploying them today. The infrastructure lead at a big financial services firm recently told Nemertes Research that the one most vital initiative infrastructure engineers can engage in is implementing AR/VR and digital twinning of their infrastructure environments and automation testing.

A digital twin checklist for infrastructure automation

For enterprise technologists trying to start with infrastructure digital twinning, what are the subsequent steps? The outline below refers to a network digital twin, but the identical recommendations can apply to other infrastructure components corresponding to servers, VMs or containers and storage appliances.

1. Virtualize and automate all changes to the production network; that’s, be certain that that each one changes to the production network occur through scripts and APIs. Stakeholders should allow no manual configuration.
2. Using this automation, capture all network configurations in a version-controlled repository, corresponding to Git.
3. Use a tool like Jenkins to develop and deploy a continuous integration/continuous delivery process and workflow that features forking the repository, proposing changes and having the tool pull down modifications. This creates scripts to implement the changes on the digital twin network, which consists of the configurations within the version-controlled repository. This involves pushing the changes out, testing that the changes are successful and notifying the network engineer that the changes are successful.
4. Using Jenkins’ capability, merge the repository and implement the changes on the production network.
5. Review and log off on the ultimate state — or, if needed, roll back the changes.
6. Consider conducting predictive maintenance on the digital twin network often to get early warning of any performance, security or other concerns. Where appropriate, deploy proactive patching and upgrades.

About the writer
Johna Till Johnson is CEO and founding father of Nemertes Research, where she sets research direction and works with strategic clients.

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