About Digital Twins
A digital twin is a spatially relevant, interactive, and (often) state-synchronized virtual replica of a physical system and / or process. Digital twins serve as virtual connectors, allowing humans to more easily interact with complex systems and data.
Gah. Too academic. How about this? Digital Twins help people understand complex things. Like, machines, systems, processes, etc. Digital Twins aren’t dashboards. They’re interactive, virtual systems that are (almost always) connected to physical systems.
Since Digital Twins primarily benefit humans, they can help drive better insights, more effective decision making, and support high-fidelity scenario planning through a virtual, and spatially relevant, representation of one or more systems.
Why build a Digital Twin? Here are some areas where they’re useful… (non-exhaustive)
- Spatially visualizing the current state of a complex system or process
- Virtually representing a system’s physical access and usage as a heat map
- Representing ‘outside of nominal’ state fluctuations in complex systems
- Enabling high-fidelity, virtual training while avoiding physical system access
- Generating simulations that can assist with future usage / production trends
About the Upcoming University Course
I’m currently developing a new course for Northeastern University titled Building Digital Twins, which will be offered for Spring Semester 2024. In this largely lab-based course, students will learn about Digital Twin concepts and technologies, and how to build their own using various commercial / open-source tools / libraries along with their own custom software developed primarily in Unity3D (subject to change), C# and/or C++ and Python.
Through this process of building their own end-to-end Digital Twin, students will develop a deeper understanding of digital twin technologies, their application, and the potential value these systems can provide.
I expect to be posting more content here in the future.
Lab Bench Studios 