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On 14/07/2021 at 17:16, Rich said:
That Information & Process/Intervention & Decisions I guess as what it’s called now, puts the Digital ahead of the Physical. I suppose what I am say is, can the Digital Twin influence the Physical and can we test the change “What ifs” on the Digital prior to making Intervention & Decisions on the Physical for better outcomes or doesn’t it work like that? How do you know that Intervention will have positive outcomes for the Physical?
Hi @Rich – I think testing “what ifs” scenarios is the prime feature or use case of digital twins. The scenarios could be to intervene on the physical (preventative maintenance schedule) or to prepare for an event in the future (responses to components failure or disaster on infrastructure systems).
I think the main way to know if the intervention is having the intended outcome is build in all digital twins a feedback loop. Depending on the scale of the DT (component, system, system-of-systems) the feedback loop (data input) might look very different and is captured differently. It would be practically easier to assess the performance of a maintenance regime on components of a train, then to determine if the extension of a new road has improved the productivity and social outcomes for a city (but this is very important).
Federation and enabling digital twins interoperability is key, and I think this point on checking if the DT delivered better outcomes emphasises this as feedback data might not come from the same digital twin that did the intervention, but from a different digital twin owned by a different organisation.