“Well-designed digital twins based on business priorities have the potential to significantly improve enterprise decision making. Enterprise architecture and technology innovation leaders must factor digital twins into their Internet of Things architecture and strategy”
Gartner’s Top 10 Technology Trends.
Digital twinning has established some buzz, particularly in IoT circles lately. Digital twins are basically digital representations of physical assets, including their status, characteristics, performance and behaviors.
But it’s not really all that new is it? OSS has been doing this for years. When was the first time you can recall seeing an inventory tool that showed:
- Digital representations of devices that were physically located thousands of kilometres away (or in the room next door for that matter)
- Visual representations of those devices (eg front-face, back-plate, rack-unit sizing, geo-spatial positioning, etc)
- Current operational state (in-service, out-of-service, in alarm, under test, real-time performance against key metrics, etc)
- Installed components (eg cards, ports, software, etc)
- Customer services being carried
- Current device configuration details
- Nearest connected neighbours
Digital twinning, this amazing new concept, has actually been around for almost as long as OSS have. We just call it inventory management though. It doesn’t sound quite so sexy when we say it.
But how can we extend what we already do into digital twinning in other domains (eg manufacturing, etc)?