FUTURE DIGITAL TWIN
De-mystifying digital twins for oil and gas Every day, we hear from our customers wanting to implement digital twins to improve operations, product offerings, and business value. A challenge, however, is that digital twins mean different things to different people. We have heard the term digital twins be applied in the broadest sense to traditional methods such as engineering design simulations, CAD models, 3D visualizations, IoT dashboards, and immersive environments. This has led to confusion as we are left wondering how does simply renaming existing methods drives new business value. To clarify, digital twins is more than just a new marketing term, but rather a new technology that has only become feasible in the past few years with the convergence of at-scale computing, predictive modeling methods, spatial computing, and IoT connectivity. 42
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n understanding our customers’ interpretations of digital twins, we found a range of concepts including engineering analysis of a physical component, predictive maintenance, performance optimization of processes, 3D virtual walkthroughs of a factory with automated operations, and everything in between.
What these ideas all have in common is that a digital twin consists of a digital representation of something in the physical world, is updated with live data, and drives business outcomes. With this backdrop, we define Digital Twin as follows: A digital twin (DT) is a living digital representation of an individual physical system that is dynamically updated with data to mimic the true structure, state, and behavior of the physical system, to drive business outcomes.
