Put simply, a digital twin is a replica of a living or non-living physical entity. But really, how useful are digital twins?
Most of the industry case studies we see in our sector, the power and utility industry vertical, have a strong focus on the non-living entity. These assets typically include poles, wires and attachments. They can also include buildings and other physical features that have the potential to interact with utility owned assets.
More challenging for digital twins are living assets. These include vegetation and temporary participants like pedestrians, and other changing entities. Vegetation has special significance as it can infringe on utility compliance space, provide fuel load for fire ignition and act as a physical protagonist in storms and when structural failure of vegetation occurs.
To enable a digital twin to be useful beyond visual context it should have the following traits.
- Be aligned to the use case – features and attributes relate to the real life problems to be solved
- Be in a format that is not only digital, but have a schema that connects to other relevant data sets