Digital Twin: Empowering Enterprises Towards a System-of-Systems Approach

Excerpt

It is common knowledge that the management of enterprise assets (e.g. plants, IT systems, staff and machineries) contributes to value creation in today’s organizations. Moreover, efficient asset management significantly enhances corporate performance. The Digital Twin (DT) is an asset’s virtual counterpart that enables enterprises to digitally mirror and manage an asset along its lifecycle. This asset can be tangible as well as non-tangible – ranging from turbines to services. In order to represent the asset’s life and behavior virtually, a DT incorporates all kinds of data related to the asset and continuously provides the enterprise with information on the asset’s condition. In fact, in some asset-centric organizations, especially those with critical infrastructures, losses due to significant downtime of the asset (e.g. a power plant) involve risks beyond the company’s financials. Here, a DT can play an important role to mitigate or even avoid these risks by comprehensively informing about the real-world asset’s status, history and its maintenance needs. Moreover, some DTs even provide a direct interaction with the asset. …