The Inter­net of Things (IoT) and its com­po­nents have been pushed through a rapid cycle of kinder­garten-stage devel­op­ment before going through ado­les­cence. That’s when the IT indus­try real­ized that most devices (and indeed plat­forms) had been devel­oped with lit­tle regard for secu­ri­ty and enter­prise scalability.

As we enter the teenage IoT years, how will the devices and soft­ware plat­forms that we cre­ate now evolve fur­ther? Specif­i­cal­ly, when we look at the cut­ting edge of ​“edge com­put­ing,” how will dig­i­tal twin tech­nol­o­gy con­tin­ue to trans­form this tech­nol­o­gy category?

Dig­i­tal Twins Defined

Dig­i­tal twins are a method for build­ing data-rich mod­els of every­thing from air­plane tur­bines to esca­la­tors and elec­tron­ic door handles.

These soft­ware-based rep­re­sen­ta­tions of real-world objects (or some form of mech­a­nized or pro­ce­dur­al sys­tem) are designed to mod­el the exact behav­ior of their real-world twins to pro­vide a plat­form for analy­sis. That analy­sis allows us to per­form pre­dic­tive main­te­nance tests, exper­i­ment with new tasks, and even apply new lev­els of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) to the way we exe­cute oper­a­tions in the real-world system.

Gart­ner esti­mates that by 2020 there will be more than 20 bil­lion con­nect­ed sen­sors and end­points. That means dig­i­tal twins could exist for poten­tial­ly bil­lions of things in the IoT uni­verse. So, what does this mean for ASUG mem­bers?

The Road to Indus­try 4.0

Ini­tial­ly, ASUG mem­bers may look to SAP Pre­dic­tive Engi­neer­ing Insights on their road to the so-called Indus­try 4.0 era where dig­i­tal twins will allow us to pre­dict and improve asset per­for­mance and reli­a­bil­i­ty. Let’s also remem­ber that SAP Leonar­do cut its teeth as an IoT plat­form, so this area of engi­neer­ing (real-world phys­i­cal engi­neer­ing and soft­ware engi­neer­ing) is very much embed­ded in SAP’s plans for enter­prise infor­ma­tion man­age­ment and enter­prise asset management.

As for the imme­di­ate future of dig­i­tal twins, what hap­pens next?

Dig­i­tal Twins in Their Teenage Years

The next shift in IoT plat­form tech­nolo­gies could see an increased degree of the democ­ra­ti­za­tion of infor­ma­tion. For exam­ple, the insights com­ing from dig­i­tal twin sys­tems could be shared with not just the engi­neer­ing and prod­uct devel­op­ment depart­ments, but also the sales and mar­ket­ing teams.

If the com­mer­cial function’s sales and mar­ket­ing teams start to get access to dig­i­tal twin infor­ma­tion, they can poten­tial­ly use it in two ways:

1. To more direct­ly per­form pre­dic­tive main­te­nance tests on the equip­ment that they them­selves use.
2. To use insights com­ing from cus­tomers to enhance the sales process itself. In oth­er words, if a sales­per­son knows more about how real-world prod­ucts per­form, that per­son will be bet­ter informed to advise cus­tomers on what to buy that best suits their needs.

Pack­aged Automation

We can also expect more bun­dles of fea­tures in dig­i­tal twin ter­ri­to­ry, such as indus­try-spe­cif­ic and task-spe­cif­ic pack­ages of soft­ware that will apply to use cas­es for auto­mat­ed devel­op­ment func­tions. In this area, SAP Leonar­do IoT Accel­er­a­tor Pack­ages already exist, as we have cov­ered in the past. As these pack­ages devel­op and offer a wider range of pre­con­fig­ured, ready-to-use func­tion­al­i­ty deliv­ered as a ser­vice, we can expect more spe­cif­ic dig­i­tal twin fla­vors to emerge from the mix.

SAP will tell us that the use of these tech­nolo­gies, ​“Enables dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion of [insert your indus­try ver­ti­cal here] com­pa­nies so they can become real-time mar­gin-dri­ven busi­ness­es.” Whether or not those pack­ages will address the core needs of each indus­try will remain to be seen. If SAP does offer a spe­cif­ic pack­age for your indus­try, it may be a good place to start eval­u­at­ing how it could offer short­cuts for bring­ing advanced tech­nolo­gies like dig­i­tal twin into your trans­for­ma­tion plans. 

Pow­er Up, Then Orchestrate

Let’s also high­light two oth­er key growth areas for dig­i­tal twins. The first area is for those who want to pow­er up and start using dig­i­tal twins. These orga­ni­za­tions will need to think about the need for rapid bidi­rec­tion­al com­mu­ni­ca­tion between a dig­i­tal twin and the actu­al phys­i­cal equip­ment in real-world simulations.

Sec­ond, as a direct result of pow­er­ing these dig­i­tal twins up, we will need to look at the respon­si­bil­i­ty for orches­tra­tion. As ASUG mem­bers grow their own IoT net­works, a spider’s web of inter­con­nect­ed infor­ma­tion streams will start to devel­op. To not over­whelm your sys­tems with dig­i­tal twin IoT data that ends up get­ting dumped into a data lake, com­pa­nies will need to pre­pare a for­mal­ized approach to orches­tra­tion. SAP Data Hub is one option to help man­age this process.

Dig­i­tal Twins, Final­ly Going to Work

Orga­ni­za­tions will now be able to build new dig­i­tal sup­ply chains with dig­i­tal twin insights form­ing the back­bone of this data chan­nel. This is one among oth­er meth­ods now sur­fac­ing that show how dig­i­tal twin tech­nol­o­gy can be applied to your busi­ness mod­el. Shar­ing more of these use cas­es and uncov­er­ing some areas that ASUG mem­bers cur­rent­ly oper­ate with may help inspire more growth in the use of dig­i­tal twins.

If you’re look­ing to learn how your peers are doing more with enter­prise asset man­age­ment, you should join us at the SAP-Cen­tric EAM & Sup­ply Chain con­fer­ence, March 16 – 18 in San Anto­nio, Texas. Ear­ly-bird reg­is­tra­tion is avail­able through Feb. 7, and ASUG mem­bers receive $200 off registration.