{"id":2477,"date":"2019-11-22T15:20:37","date_gmt":"2019-11-22T15:20:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/?p=2477"},"modified":"2019-11-22T15:22:23","modified_gmt":"2019-11-22T15:22:23","slug":"digital-twins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/digital-twins\/","title":{"rendered":"Digital Twins"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By Dustin Halcon – https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/dustin-halcon\/25726596980\/in\/album-72157666317573535\/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/w\/index.php?curid=47723319<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u2018Digital twins\u2019\u00a0are in\u00a0the headlines this year and I have attended two events focusing on digital twins in the last few weeks. The first was in the context of the built environment and the second in aerospace and it was interesting to compare the approaches.<\/p>\n

A digital twin is a digital replica of a physical system and can be used to gain insight into the operation of its physical counterpart. Formula 1 teams use highly complex digital twins for their race cars.\u00a0 The car is modelled and simulated to a high level of detail and data is collected in real time from the physical car to feed into the simulations in the digital twin.\u00a0 The digital twin can be used to predict the performance of the car\u00a0to help improve its design,\u00a0and\u00a0the\u00a0data\u00a0collected\u00a0from the car refines the accuracy of the\u00a0simulation.<\/p>\n

The Centre for Digital Built Britain (CDBB) hosted their Summer Showcase<\/a>\u00a0 on 12th\u00a0September, reporting on CDBB supported research. The keynote was from Paul Clarke, Chief Technology Officer at Ocado and was truly mind expanding.\u00a0 I thought of Ocado as a\u00a0 groceries home delivery service and had a mental image of their early warehouses with crates moving around the warehouse on conveyors in three dimensions.\u00a0 But Ocado is now a hub for digital technologies, and they are selling their technology around the world as the \u2018Ocado Smart Platform\u2019.\u00a0 The latest Ocado automated warehouses are populated with swarms of wheeled robots that pick the customers orders by traversing a huge 2D floor grid, picking up the items from baskets under the floor and delivering them to the crates for packing into customer orders.\u00a0\u00a0Take a look\u00a0at the video to see how it works:\u00a0https:\/\/youtu.be\/4DKrcpa8Z_E<\/a>\u00a0. Ocado simulated everything during the development of their\u00a0warehouses\u00a0 and\u00a0has created a digital twin of both its warehouses and delivery systems.<\/p>\n

Professor Andrew Neely introduced the national digital twin project that aims to develop an \u201cecosystem of\u00a0connected digital twins enabling better\u00a0decisions faster across the built environment\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0Other research of interest was\u00a0Dr\u00a0Li\u00a0Wan\u2019s\u00a0research into\u00a0how\u00a0a\u00a0city-level\u00a0digital\u00a0twin\u00a0can be created.\u00a0His\u00a0research presented an ambitious view of a digital twin of an entire city based on a\u00a0realistic digital representation\u00a0of urban assets, processes and systems.\u00a0There was also\u00a0related work by\u00a0Ajith\u00a0Parlikad\u00a0and\u00a0Dr Jennifer Schoolings\u00a0into the governance of digital technology\u00a0and its implications for the city-scale digital twin.\u00a0They highlighted\u00a0the challenges of upscaling an engineering digital twin to a city-wide model.<\/p>\n

The Royal Aeronautical Society\u2019s conference \u201cThe Real World’s Counterpart: Digital Twins – The present and the future<\/a>\u201d\u00a0on 8th\u00a0October\u00a0presented a range of\u00a0applications\u00a0of digital twins\u00a0from aircraft engines to manufacturing systems and beyond.\u00a0 A highlight was\u00a0Mr\u00a0Clinton Davies-Taylor\u2019s presentation on the Living Heart project that\u00a0has\u00a0created\u00a0a digital twin of the human heart. A huge collaborative team has created high quality simulations of a human heart, that can be used to plan heart surgery and\u00a0understand the heart\u2019s behavior.\u00a0You can find our more here:\u00a0https:\/\/3dexperiencelab.3ds.com\/en\/projects\/life\/living-heart\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Jonathan Eyre from the Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre highlighted the lack of consistency in the definition of digital twins. Currently it seems that any\u00a0\u00a0complex product\u00a0simulation is claimed to be a digital twin, but\u00a0a key element of a digital twin must be the link to\u00a0a physical product.<\/p>\n

So, what are the benefits of developing a digital twin?\u00a0Today, it is products that require high levels of maintenance and reliability that show the most benefits \u2013 aeroengines, F1 cars, manufacturing systems.\u00a0 The extension of digital twins to a broader range of applications like cities and whole nations looks like it has potential, but there is more work to be done to prove the benefits.<\/p>\n

We are developing a new Open Digital Prototyping Laboratory in the Design group at the Open University and will be investigating digital twins of complex products and buildings as part of our research.\u00a0We\u00a0are keen to hear from potential partners or PhD researchers who would like to work with us, email me at helen.lockett@open.ac.uk.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2018Digital twins\u2019\u00a0are in\u00a0the headlines this year and I have attended two events focusing on digital twins in the last few weeks. The first was in the context of the built environment and the second in aerospace and it was interesting to compare the approaches. A digital twin is a digital replica of a physical system […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":2478,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-design-comment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2477","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2477"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2477\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2482,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2477\/revisions\/2482"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2478"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}