By Sophie Peachey, Business Development Director, IOTICS
In the fast-evolving digital landscape, digital twins have emerged as powerful tools, offering tremendous measurable value to both businesses and society. This has been made infinitely clear in what I’ve observed with regards to the changing emphasis in value during my 10-years-plus experience working around the Digital-Twin approach.
To begin, let’s establish some context. This is the definition of a Digital Twin on which I rely working across sectors, and to which I refer here:
“A live digital coupling of the state of a physical asset or process to a virtual representation with a functional output.” Untangling the requirements of a Digital Twin, October 2020, Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre/University of Sheffield
By harnessing real-time data, digital twins allow organisations to simulate, monitor, and optimise operations in ways previously unimaginable. When combined with secure data sharing, digital twins offer even greater promise for innovation, efficiency, and sustainability.
The origin story
One of the most significant benefits of digital twins is their ability to provide real-time insights. In combination with our founding principle of the secure, selective sharing of data, these insights can have wide-reaching impact across ecosystems of stakeholders. We have found the ‘selective’ element of sharing to be particularly impactful in terms of the ongoing use of a Digital-Twin approach. As asset and data owners fully appreciate how they retain control over what they share and when through their Digital Twin – acting as the protective proxy to their real-world asset – they increase in confidence about the information they are willing to share. We have named this phenomenon ‘the evolution of trust’, and we’ve observed new use cases to blossom and grow as a result.
The early adoption we saw tended to focus on a single asset. For example, we worked with Rolls-Royce Power Systems taking a Digital-Twin approach to providing a holistic view of data around its fleets of power generating units, with the Digital Twin of each individual asset a focal point for its own information.
In March 2019, Andeas Schell, then CEO of Rolls Royce Power Systems (RRPS), reported record revenues in 2018: up 15% to £3.5 billion. He said that they were: ‘…reaping the rewards of our hard work on the transformational change programme which has made us significantly more profitable.’
Its Digital Twin approach was part of that strategy. By enabling a ‘single pane of glass’ ability to query information about specific assets within and across its fleet of power-generating units, Rolls-Royce was able to ‘see our products in the way our customers do’, addressing issues quickly, and modifying the way it deployed its servitisation business model.
Additionally, it was able to evolve its understanding of asset performance framed by its operating conditions. Understanding more about each asset meant being able to relate it to contextual information to improve understanding further.
However, the commercial justification was very much about a single organisation making operational efficiencies and developing new revenue streams from new digital services focused on one asset.
Improved efficiency Through Collaborative Sharing
In 2019, BAM Nuttall was taking a place-based view because the centre of its world was the construction site. The commercial driver was in the most part operational efficiency. However, to achieve this, BAM needed to understand performance across a wide range of assets – many of which it didn’t own.
This is where we start to see interest from organisations in working together in their digital-twin approach to achieve a single, shared objective.
Deploying a digital ecosystem with properly managed data security and privacy, companies like BAM Nuttall are able to create a data governance framework of policies and processes, giving them the ability to collaborate without compromising sensitive information, unlocking the full potential of digital twins, and leveraging combined knowledge and expertise across an ecosystem of partners and suppliers.
The much-covered CReDo project is not dissimilar – taking a digital-twin approach to improve the management of place-based events. The value and return on investment can be harder to quantify in terms of commercial impact, because you are looking at savings against what might otherwise have happened. However, value is by no means impossible to pinpoint.
In one such exercise against a use case in the regulated context of the Rail industry, our client used penalty payments as the proxy indicator for the type of commercial return possible. This team was driving operational efficiency through a digital-twin approach to sharing information and insight. By establishing the level of penalty payments the team could avoid through improved availability of assets, the estimated savings were £1.5m per year.
As digital twins are deployed across ecosystems, providing a unifying focus, data becomes easier to discover and access. For businesses, this generates the capacity to make data-driven decisions more effectively. By simulating scenarios and optimising operations, companies can reduce downtime, cut costs, and increase overall efficiency
Sustainability and Resource Optimisation
Let’s jump forward to now. The SEA CHANGE project at Portsmouth International Port brings together an ecosystem of partners looking at multiple drivers and multiple objectives umbrellaed by PIP’s overall intent to achieve Net Zero by 2035. SEA CHANGE is introducing shore power to the port so that compatible vessels can switch off their diesel engines when port side and run off majority green-produced electricity. Brittany Ferries, part of the consortium, is also deploying hybrid ferries which can be charged up at the port so that they can embark from Portsmouth under electric power to prevent pollution blowing back into the city.
Of course, the team is looking at operational efficiencies in the way that the project and port can run by embracing a digital-twin approach, but we are also considering the impact on people’s health, transport choices and wider regional benefits.
Crucially, the project also shines a light on how the business model around the provision of shore power by UK ports can function, enabling researchers to consider scenarios for adoption to explore questions crucial to the future decarbonisation of maritime.
For example, will Shore Power always need to be subsidised owing to geopolitical differences in electricity prices to incentivise vessel operators to switch off their engines and keep our air cleaner, or will the commercial model stand up on its own? How will this work for smaller ports or ones serving a smaller variety of vessels in comparison to Portsmouth?
This is all unknown, and something that a Digital-Twin approach can be used to investigate.
What of the future?
The possibilities are exciting. As technology continues to evolve, the convergence of digital twins with AI will bring new solutions that were once the realm of science fiction.
We see a useful application of the Digital-Twin approach in the enablement of Generative AI, as a means to offer contextualised data through federated knowledge graphs which draw their information from an ecosystem of related Digital Twins.
The potential for AI to identify insights by taking this approach is once again efficiency and also, perhaps, something more. Self-sovereign Digital Twins, with data owners retaining control over how they share data and when, means that federated ecosystems of Digital Twins can flex and change dependent upon circumstances, giving us new answers to the same questions as context changes.
Part of the justification for the business case of the Digital-Twin approach of the future is swiftly becoming how it provides the means to justify new business cases. A Digital-Twin approach combined with decentralised RAG can answer whether or not there is sufficient data available to fulfil a use case and where the gaps are, establishing even before the start whether a project is viable.
Unsurprisingly, I’m not the only person mulling over the changing way in which the Digital-Twin approach is impacting business and commercial models. It would be remiss of me not to draw your attention to the impending work of the team that TechUK has pulled together to look at emerging business models and economic impact.
You will all have different experience of establishing business cases and proving value around the Digital-Twin approach depending on your own entry point to Digital-Twin technology. Mine is through recognising the need for interoperability and secure, selective data sharing. I urge you to share your own journey and viewpoint by contributing to the Gemini Calls about your own experience.
About IOTICS
IOTICS enables federated decentralised ecosystems of proprietary data to integrate securely and seamlessly into AI workflows, without the unsustainable duplication of vast quantities of data, therefore improving decision making and time to value for anyone developing or adopting AI.
Watch the Gemini Call Presentation
Want to see how these insights were originally shared with the Digital Twin Hub community? Watch my Gemini Call presentation where Sophie discussed the evolution of Digital Twins and their expanding value across ecosystems:
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References
Rail industry:
TechUK report:
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