“A digital twin is a virtual representation of real-world entities and processes, synchronized at a specified frequency and fidelity.”
- “Digital twins are motivated by outcomes, tailored to use cases, powered by integration, built on data, guided by domain knowledge, and implemented in IT/OT systems…”
https://blog.digitaltwinconsortium.org/2020/12/digital-twin-consortium-defines-digital-twin.html
Through creative technology foresight, AFFECTLI’s development team already provide the tightly interlaced development capabilities for unique customer needs in addressing the motivations as defined by the Digital Twin Consortium.
Digital Twins in Telco Towers
A Telco Tower is any structure or device-set that organisations use for transmitting and/or receiving radio, television, telegraph or micro-wave signals.
Using digital twins in Telco Towers can also help organisations to reduce the time and costs spent on a project and minimise glitches and errors. Digital twins also benefit the physical operational efficiencies such as the planning, design, deployment, maintenance support, network optimisation, the entire physical operational life cycle of a telco tower and new technology transmission devices.
Stimulated outcomes can present insights into new and innovative business models and enable businesses to enhance their understanding of network performance, and business processes and customer behaviour. A digital twin also pushes operators to not allow several months between real changes in the field and the digital representation of that reality.
Digital Twins in 5G
The capabilities of 5G can enable a number of digital twin use cases that depend on the efficient and reliable movements of vast quantities of data.
5G and digital twins mutually benefit one another as 5G could amplify the business case for digital twins.
Digital twins can enable industries to build the 5G business case through IIOT monitoring & measurements in concert with emulating 5G network capabilities, which, for manufacturing, can help address integration concerns and demonstrate the value of 5G. Without the risk of upfront adoption, developers and manufacturers can plan, test, configure and optimise their infrastructure and explore 5G use cases.
Digital Twins in Off-shore Wind Farms
Off-shore wind farms are billion-dollar investments that usually demand substantial hours and manpower to keep them running optimally for as long as possible.
Industries are facing extensive investments to upgrade or reinforce their current structures in order to maintain production for the future.
The environments of these wind farms are harsh, and the structures need to be able to withstand erosion caused through waves, wind, soil conditions, and other environmental factors.
A digital twin model for this type of industry that continuously monitors structures and updates with real-time information will reduce the countless man-hours checking up on these structures. The integrated digital twin does all of this automatically and alerts the client of any issues that need to be addressed.
Digital Twins in Solar Farms
There is a massive opportunity to integrate intelligent technology into the solar industry. Although most sensitive parts of a solar farm are already computerised, the utilisation of that data to build predictive capabilities remains relatively untapped.
Solar farm operators can use digital twins to help identify maintenance needs more quickly, also to provide early risk-alerts of potential failure. When seamlessly integrated with AI/ML capabilities, the twin provides the ability to analyse, visualise and report when the plant is not operating as it should, through deep analytics of massive amounts of data.
A digital twin can’t prevent failures from happening, but it can help the operators plan for pro-active maintenance by using data from the solar farm it is modelling as well as historical data from tens of thousands of other assets. This then enables the twin to be a core contributor in simulations of certain situations, and to use machine-learning in determining how to maximise the farm’s performance in those situations.
Evolving from Smart Buildings to Intelligent Buildings
A digital twin for a smart building is a contextual model of an entire smart building environment. A dynamic digital replica that is used to solve a wide variety of issues. The digital twin of a smart building is not just a digital replica of physical assets, but rather, a complex model of how people and processes interact with their environments. Such an approach transforms the Smart building into the Intelligent building.
The digital twin for an Intelligent building is basically a bridge between that of the digital and physical worlds. It does this by using connected sensors and IIoT devices to collect real-time data about physical items. Data is then combined with context and processed, which is used to understand, analyse, manipulate and optimise processes within an Intelligent building.
Digital twins allow for the opening up of new possibilities by bridging the gap between physical assets, operations and occupants. They provide a new understanding of the impacts of operations on people and how people impact operations. Integrating a digital twin system such as AFFECTLI into operations enables building management organisations to stay fully informed, Intelligently, Always.
