The Key to Digital Twin Success: A Strong Data Ecosystem

The use of digital twin technology is expected to more than double by 2025. In a recent Gartner survey of companies from various industries across six countries, 75% of respondents said they have already implemented or plan to implement a digital twin within a year.

Successfully implementing and using digital twins to improve efficiency and make decisions requires mature data management and integration. Asite, a digital transformation company, talks about the golden thread concept. 

from SmarTBRIEF

“The golden thread introduces formal processes to maintain digital information, assure accuracy, and ensure accessibility and security,” Asite says. “In a nutshell, it should act as a live repository linking all asset data. Figuring out how to achieve this golden thread of information is imperative for businesses looking to derive value from their data and is a foundational step in the deployment of a digital twin.”

Digital twins work best when there is an unencumbered flow of data from the beginning of the project throughout its life span and beyond. But that’s not always a reality. 

“Due to the nature of our segmented supply chains, we only consider data within our own organizational structure, rather than data of the lifecycle of an asset,” said Jennifer Schooling, director of the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction. That fragmentation, she says, results in siloed engagement with data that inhibits its potential. 

“Creating a system to encourage data exchange is meaningless without an environment in which it can succeed,” Asite wrote. “As digital twin technology brings together a variety of stakeholders, industries would benefit from an interconnected ecosystem built around an open platform in which data flows freely. This open platform, supported by open data schemes and ontologies that ensure standardization, would enable applications to interact and get data from each other securely, allowing the ecosystem to send, receive, capture, store, share and collaborate. Ultimately, all data related to a project would live here.”

In the U.S., Asite is part of the Digital Twin Consortium, which is looking to advance digital twin technology through open-source development. In the UK, the Centre for Digital Built Britain’s National Digital Twin program is maximizing the value of the technology by creating a national ecosystem of connected digital twins.

Cityzenith is using digital twin technology to help cities avoid inadvertently underreporting their carbon emissions. Northern Arizona University (NAU) has developed a tool called Vulcan, which uses data about pollution from power plants, factories, buildings, and vehicles to help cities estimate fossil-fuel emissions at specific geographic points and across large areas. Cityzenith says its digital twin software can aggregate all new data and then use AI to develop solutions to the problems highlighted by NAU and the Vulcan team.

On a global scale, the European Union is expected to begin work on “Destination Earth,” an initiative to develop a high-precision digital model of Earth to monitor and simulate natural and human activity and to develop and test scenarios that would enable more sustainable development and support European environmental policies. The project will use a cloud-based modeling and simulation platform that will integrate digital replicas of various systems and phenomena, such as weather forecasting and climate change, food and water security, global ocean circulation and the biogeochemistry of the oceans. 

Data in a silo is only helpful to a certain extent. A larger ecosystem of asset, emissions, and industry data can help provide more insights and opportunities for the sector at large. 

Working together can make digital twins like two peas in a pod.