According to the latest research from ABI Research, the installed base of digital twin and city modelling deployments is expected to grow from just a handful of early implementations in 2019 to more than 500 by 2025.
“Originally developed for industrial systems, the digital twin concept is now spreading to the smart cities environment,” says Dominique Bonte, vice president for End Markets at ABI Research. “However, it won’t be a single Uber-like digital twin for an entire city but rather an aggregation and integration of domain-specific digital twins for systems like smart buildings, traffic infrastructure, energy grids, and water management.”
Read more: Digital twin concept spreads into smart city environments
Dr Paul Cureton of ImaginationLancaster at Lancaster University and Elliot Hartley, managing director of Garsdale Design, examine the UK’s digital twin ambitions
“[If to develop future] infrastructure is to encourage national coherence rather than a new kind of balkanisation, then its development must be guided by policies and standards that assure interoperability between all the subnetworks of the national system.” William Mitchell, City of Bits (1995)
Read more: Digital twin ambitions: How to catch up with the future
There have already been steam turbines which have lasted for over 82 years before they were decommissioned and with rapid advancements, machine immortality seems not too far away.
In any industry, there has always been a notion of models for a given asset, whether a jet engine or a compressor. What if there was a living, learning model which could be constantly fed with data and updated, so that it allowed engineers to predict any problems and prevent it, throughout the entire lifecycle of the asset? The vice president of GE Software Research, Colin Parris, calls this model, developed and maintained digitally, a digital twin.