Intro
With the word twins many of us associate the twin sisters from the famous haunted room in the movie “The Shining” , instead with the word digital the Artificial Intelligence Skynet from the movie “Terminator 2” that wanted to destroy Humanity.
Aside from noting that 1980s films have horror drifts in every pore, the pairing of twins with digital incites a certain awe/respect; because it almost announces a creating and generating out of nothing.
Of course it is disturbing but, also exciting .
Digital Twin and its evolution.
The underlying concept has no philosophy that smacks of the new, as Michael Grieves, a researcher and professor at the University of Michigan who is credited with the invention of the digital twin, explains in a book.
“For most of human history, the virtual space in which this system was created existed only in people’s minds. It is only in the last quarter of the 20th century that this virtual space was able to exist in the digital space of computers,” he writes.
With the advancement of digital technologies, the Digital Twin enables more efficient management of systems, saving costs and time, right from the design stage.
The first steps toward the Digital Twin: the Mirrored Space Model
he concept was first expressed by Grieves in 2002, in a presentation for a proposed Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) center.
Digital Twin: a real space, a virtual space, and the linking of the flow of data and information between real space to virtual space.
This PLM would not be a static object, but would follow the entire life cycle of the actual system, from creation, to implementation, to use, and finally to disposal.
The virtual system was thus a mirror of the real one, and was therefore referred to as the “Mirrored Spaces Model” and later as the “Information Mirroring Model.”
How to get to the Digital Twin term
In some subsequent publications, the concept proposed by Grieves is also referred to as the “Information Mirroring Model.” It was in 2011 with the essay “Virtually Perfect: Driving Innovative and Lean Products through Product Lifecycle Management,” that Grieves first discussed Digital Twin.
The term is used by the researcher to describe “a set of virtual information constructs that completely describe a potential or actual physical artifact, from the micro atomic level to the macro geometric level.”
A B.I.M sample
In fact, this system is an evolution, not to say renaming, of digital simulators that have been present for decades in a wide variety of manufacturing sectors.
An example, are the B.I.M. systems used in construction that reconstruct 3-D models of environments and then recreate all the plant engineering around them. In the Digital Twin model, there is deeper and more practical technology awareness and improved mathematical models ; not the least, processing capabilities are enhanced with Machine Learning and Deep Learning algorithms.
Technologies that will be declined in so many areas: Healthcare , Marketing ( we will discuss this in another post ) , Automotive , Precision Mechanics , Seismic Modeling , Econometric Models .
To summarize any area where a forecasting model needs to be created.
Some will ask: could the tourism industry be included in the utilization of this Technology ?
Yes, and with methodologies “orthogonal” to the usual . The marketing and tourism revenue management part comes in almost automatically; we will talk about that in other posts .
Interesting, however, is that of Gamification . Imagine creating ( re-creating ) digitally a familiar tourist city, or inventing a brand new one. Many of you will have played or seen simulative video-games such as Sim-city , where you are in the role of a Mayor-Engineer who creates a city from scratch and must know how to manage it without making it fail both economically and socially.
We could create with a “digital twin” this kind of location and have our guests play the game before they even leave for an actual destination. Some , might see it as a giant advertising vehicle and that’s it but, what if instead it was itself the product? Maybe, this virtual city could be a city in the Future with lawns , squares, museums that do not exist but would charge millions of viewers to visit.
More and more niches of cyber travelers are revealing that they love traveling in their favorite games .
Think of such famous video games as Fallout 3 , the Halo saga , the lore of the various Dark Souls where the protagonist’s journey has a shared importance on par with gameplay. There are players who have created an alter ego on the role-playing video game , medieval-fantasy setting , and have been living in virtual taverns for 10 years !
The digital twin offers that perspective that in the United States is called : What if …
Simulation will become even closer to reality with Web 3.0, when the congeries of Big Data will increase the correlation between phenomena and the factors that produce them. In this case, the metadata that many users will add as support to the data themselves will be the real creators of creating perfectly simulated and reproduced worlds and situations.
Obviously, it would be reductive to equate a video game with a “digital twin” because the latter through algorithms , but also microprocessors , dedicated reproduce the physical laws of the elements and have a simulative depth unthinkable even five years ago. All this makes us think about what can be produced in a few years , and the creative trend that will grow thanks to the increase of data for voracious Artificial Intelligences.
