Henry Fenby-Taylor
Forum Replies Created
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As an adopted son I would think probably yes. Perhaps a digital twin of the rail network will be the thin end of the wedge.
At the end of the day, during Covid, rail travel isn’t making the money and some services need to exist whether they’re making money or not which let’s face it provides serious challenges for a private business.
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On 20/10/2020 at 20:49, David Roberts said:
Digital Twins suffer from the same problem as Artificial Intelligence, as the English grammar goes the term is very simple and self-descriptive, but what it is trying to describe is very broad and complicated and so it just leads to an easy misuse of the term as it just “sounds” so simple.
Trying to tightly bind a detailed technical definition to a simple term will never remove the misuse and repeated misunderstanding.
I feel like the popularity of the term AI is probably because of the simplicity, but its progress as fields of study is almost despite it @David Roberts !
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5 hours ago, Chris Dent said:
I hope to join the workshop, and indeed am just writing a blog post on the definitions of AI and DT.
My view is generally that trying to define what is and is not a DT is not a helpful pursuit, at least not in the kind of work I do, as it’s irrelevant in most practical questions. The relevant question is what the appropriate decision support analysis should be, not what we call it. The caveat on this is that I mostly work in planning and policy rather than detailed engineering design or system operation – except for specialist interest in power system control room algorithms.
When the post goes up (need to finish editing it) I’ll flag in this DT hub conversation.
Look forward to reading it. @Chris Dent
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Well, first off, let’s have that conversation! I think we need to have it.
This article made me think. On reflection, I have two concerns about the direction this conversation is taking.
One, that we don’t want to see our businesses and our clients’ organisations sold products that don’t deliver the benefits of digital twins. The digital twin movement loses, the client loses and the winner doesn’t create a sustainable business for themselves so ultimately they lose too. We’re taken in by gimmicks, we create wealth in a short sighted fashion and productivity doesn’t improve.
Two, once something is decided, that means we can stop thinking about it. That’s the point of making decisions. So if it was decreed that only a physical system connected to a digital management system providing real time data counts as a digital twin then we would lose out as well. Suddenly certain data sets, applications and approaches ‘don’t count’. Everyone loses again, the digital twin movement loses key collaborators and innovations, these brave outsiders lose, because they’re out of the fold pushing a genuine solution that the general consensus tells people isn’t worth it and the clients lose, because despite having a solution that ticks all the boxes and ‘counts’, they don’t have a solution that serves their actual needs (I’m thinking of logistics and city management systems here).
I don’t think there is a complete answer, in the words of Michael Grieves “it’s an analogy, so don’t take it too literally”. So we should be careful about going into the depths of over qualifying what is and what isn’t a digital twin. At the same time we should be able to recognise what is and isn’t a digital twin and even more than that we should be able to recognise the genuinely ground breaking innovative work when it happens.
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Well, first off, let’s have that conversation! I think we need to have it.
This article made me think. On reflection, I have two concerns about the direction this conversation is taking.
One, that we don’t want to see our businesses and our clients’ organisations sold products that don’t deliver the benefits of digital twins. The digital twin movement loses, the client loses and the winner doesn’t create a sustainable business for themselves so ultimately they lose too. We’re taken in by gimmicks, we create wealth in a short sighted fashion and productivity doesn’t improve.
Two, once something is decided, that means we can stop thinking about it. That’s the point of making decisions. So if it was decreed that only a physical system connected to a digital management system providing real time data counts as a digital twin then we would lose out as well. Suddenly certain data sets, applications and approaches ‘don’t count’. Everyone loses again, the digital twin movement loses key collaborators and innovations, these brave outsiders lose, because they’re out of the fold pushing a genuine solution that the general consensus tells people isn’t worth it and the clients lose, because despite having a solution that ticks all the boxes and ‘counts’, they don’t have a solution that serves their actual needs (I’m thinking of logistics and city management systems here).
I don’t think there is a complete answer, in the words of Michael Grieves “it’s an analogy, so don’t take it too literally”. So we should be careful about going into the depths of over qualifying what is and what isn’t a digital twin. At the same time we should be able to recognise what is and isn’t a digital twin and even more than that we should be able to recognise the genuinely ground breaking innovative work when it happens.
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@Neil now that I see it graphically it makes more sense
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oh man this is big, I’ve skimmed it, but I’ll come back to it in earnest soon @Ian Gordon.
From my first pass the tone is right and it doesn’t read like policy statements of old that sought to write in stone eternal truths and irrefutable facts with thou shalts and orders from on high, but ultimately were trying to nail jelly to the wall. This reads like something that clearly sets out the philosophy, the context and the direction of travel for digital twins in HE that understands the fluid nature of the situation and is ready to adapt to that.
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I like the idea of gamifying @Steven , to me that means thinking about the ‘game loop’ of using a digital twin. We have looked at how digital twins data state is always changing, but I think more could be done to think about who is interacting with a digital twin and how in a granular fashion not just a business as usual digital twin, but a digital twin in edge cases and emergencies.
To me owning the Internet of Things is like owning an idea. Yes, we may own a thing, or a network of things. To me it’s like saying you ‘own the logistics of things’ when you own a car, or a freight company you don’t own the road or the rules of the road and your use of it comes with all the joys of interacting with other road users.
