If you had asked us back in the 80s what we expected to see for the dates we currently live in, perhaps the answer was full of holograms, virtual doubles, flying cars, and teleportation . At least that is what many of us drank from the cinema, television and books and comics of that time.
The future , however, has not been like in those movies. Although it may be that in some things it comes close . The irruption of the metaverse has brought to the fore something that has been in the making for some time: digital twins.
A digital twin is “the virtual representation of a model that can be an object, a process or an infrastructure” . This is how engineer Alejandro Giménez, IT Manager at Hiberus, defines it, where he is in charge of the analysis and design of the architecture of technical solutions and, specifically, of the Globe project, a global platform for 3D virtualization and optimization of industrialized BIM processes in Industry 4.0. .
The creation of digital models of the physical world is something increasingly established in all sectors, providing benefits in terms of efficiency, productivity and cost and time savings. This is due to the fact that the ‘digital twins’ go one step beyond simulations, offering identical representations to the real ones that already exist -or will exist in the future-. These twins, being an exact replica of something physical, have been designed to behave in the same way that the real double would in a given situation.
Digital twins can become very complex , for example, says the Hiberus expert, a representation of an entire city could be created. You might think that this is something simple, since it is something that has been done for a long time in the world of video games , but the nuance here is different.
We are talking about the fact that we would need to create that city in what we now call the metaverse , with all its details, its buildings, its citizens and their actions… in short, all the little things that happen every day in a city .
Cities like Singapore or Shanghai have digital twins , replicas that allow better logistical or urban solutions to be designed. Even the European Union has already commissioned a replica of the planet called Destination Earth that makes it possible to predict floods, droughts, heat waves and other natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis or eruptions. Their goal: design better emergency plans to save as many lives as possible.
Driving on a highway before it is built, calculating the deterioration of a work over the years or visiting an extension work at a railway station are real examples of the use of this technology. And everyone wants to apply it, because digital twins enable proactive decisions about disruptive changes .
Industry application
For what today the digital twin technology is being exploited the most is for the industrial sector. However, here we come across development problems: there are no programs that generate the virtual representation of the manufacturing process of a company .
“It is easy to represent things like a piece of clothing or furniture, as IKEA does with its app to place furniture at home using augmented reality or clothing stores to provide a virtual experience when going to the fitting room. It is simple because we are talking about a specific product and there will be modelers who are exclusively dedicated to it . But making a model of the industrial process of a factory is very complex and we don’t have the time to make such complex digital twins”, explains Giménez.
Even so, the engineer qualifies, making a digital twin of a garment or piece of furniture entails a certain complexity, because lights, shadows, movement must be taken into account… factors that if not carefully attended to, the result can be a representation virtual without detail and, therefore, somewhat tacky.
According to some specialists in robotics , these twins may be with us within ten years . Currently, the most advanced use of this technology is in medicine, where exact virtual replicas of human hearts already exist. Experts predict that the day will come when we will all have a digital twin for medical reasons : a replica in which to apply preventive medicine and personalize treatments to the maximum.
Now the goal is to be able to transfer all this to the industrial sector . A report from the Capgemini Research Institute shows that 34% of companies already use these proxy solutions to achieve their goals. And, according to IDC, 70% of manufacturers will use this technology for process simulations and scenario evaluations in the near future. A trend confirmed by MarketsandMarkets, which believes that the use of digital twins will grow to 35.8 billion dollars in 2025.
Digital twins are helping companies to simulate processes and operations , generating an optimization of costs, times and use of resources. For example, says Giménez, if a store decided to create its virtual replica, it could make changes in the distribution of the garments or in the organization of the establishment to see if these changes result in an increase in sales because customers see the products better.
“The digitization of the European industrial fabric will contribute, according to estimates by the European Union , more than 90,000 million euros in savings . In Spain, we only have 5% of the highly digitized industrial fabric, which gives us a dimension of the work that we must do to be able to take advantage of part of these millions,” says Elena Madera, Director of Industry at T-Systems Iberia, a company that has developed TwinX, a solution that goes beyond the digital twin , establishing the link between the real world and the digital world present in a factory with a high level of industrial automation.
