The Ultimate Map of “Intelligence+”: The World of Digital Twins

A digital twin digitally copies a physical object, simulates the object's behavior in the real environment, and virtually simulates products, manufacturing processes, and even entire factories, thereby improving the production efficiency of product research and development and manufacturing of manufacturing companies.

Unlike traditional product design, digital twin technology creates products in a virtual three-dimensional space and can easily modify every dimension and assembly relationship of components and products, greatly simplifying the verification of product geometry, assembly feasibility, and process feasibility. It can significantly reduce the number, time, and cost of manufacturing physical prototypes during the iteration process.

According to Gartner's forecast, by 2021, 50% of large industrial enterprises around the world will use digital twin technology, increasing efficiency by 10%. Especially for companies in the manufacturing and engineering industries, if they want to stay ahead of the competition, they need to consider incorporating the implementation of digital twin technology into the company's intelligent development strategy.

The real function of digital twins is to establish a comprehensive quasi-real-time connection between the physical world and the digital world, to achieve interconnection, intercommunication and interoperability between the physical world and the digital world, to build a new system for the virtual world to describe, diagnose, predict and make decisions about the physical world, and to optimize the efficiency of resource allocation in the physical world.

From the perspective of specific implementation paths, digital twins first integrate various data of physical objects and are faithful mappings of physical objects. Secondly, digital twins exist throughout the life cycle of physical objects, evolve with them, and continuously accumulate relevant knowledge. Finally, digital twins not only describe physical objects, but can also optimize physical objects based on models, ultimately achieving transformation of the physical world.

The Boeing 777 is the world's first passenger aircraft designed without drawings or models using digital twins. The Boeing 777 has as many as 3 million parts, and there was no "drawing" during the design process, and it was directly mass-produced. Through digital twin technology, the R&D cycle was effectively shortened by 40% and the amount of rework was reduced by 50%.

In the construction of smart cities, digital twins provide more possibilities. A few cities have taken the lead in using digital twin technology for smart city management, and Hangzhou's digital twin city has taken shape. In Hangzhou's Xiaoshan District, the automatic allocation of traffic lights by Alibaba Cloud ET City Brain has shortened the time for 120 ambulances to arrive at the scene by half, using technology to open a "green lifeline" for patients on the road of emergency treatment where every second counts. With the power of ET City Brain, Hangzhou has now achieved intelligent configuration of traffic lights, and the travel time in the pilot area has been reduced by 15.3%.

Dassault's "beating heart" project has successfully captured how each muscle fiber generates electricity to replicate

The 3D model of the heart is able to accurately depict the actual movement of the human heart. The model builds itself after the entire physical process is accurately depicted. Seeing the defects of the 3D version of the heart firsthand helps surgeons plan the best surgical plan.

With the further integration of traditional modeling and simulation technology with the Internet of Things, big data, and artificial intelligence technology, the value and role of digital twins will be more reflected, and digital twins will play a more important role in more fields.

In the future, whether in manufacturing, medical care, construction and other fields, a set of operating systems that are linked to physical space in real time will be explored and established in the cyber world to optimize resource allocation in manufacturing processes, building structures, medical experiments, urban management and other aspects. The resource optimization allocation system based on "physical entity + digital twin" will become the ultimate model of digital development.

The explosive growth of data in the past few decades means that the digital twin of the physical world is constantly improving. In the future, the digital mirror of the physical world will be continuously improved from time-sharing to real-time, from macro to micro, to form a complete digital twin. Its role has evolved from assisting humans in transforming the physical world to determining the transformation of the physical world, and even creating a new world beyond human imagination.