Integrating IoT and Digital Twins Digital twins are high-detail virtual emulations of physical devices, places, or systems that offer many benefits. For example, they allow highly accurate modeling of real-world environments so businesses can predict problems before they occur. They can also provide powerful visualization tools, bringing data to life and making it more accessible and easier to understand.
With IoT, we can create even more sophisticated digital twins. IoT devices handle vast amounts of data in real-time, but often businesses don’t fully leverage this data. For example, they might use IoT sensors on plant machinery to track and manage the machine’s performance. With this sensor data, they might make informed decisions about when to schedule maintenance or upgrade machine parts, but they rarely use this data to gain insights into the whole plant operation.
This is where digital twins come in. Imagine a digital twin of the plant building – a sophisticated 3D model complete with all related plant data. This allows businesses to accurately test changes to the operation at rapid speed and without risking the production environment.
Digital Twins as a Single Source of Truth Organizations are increasingly moving away from siloed systems and disparate data due to the massive inefficiencies caused by this way of working. Unfortunately, on its own, IoT can exacerbate this problem – smart device data can end up in siloed systems and cut off from the wider intelligence of the organization.
However, digital twins can combat this problem by functioning as a data lake or repository where all IoT data can come together. This has the considerable benefit of allowing the digital twin to serve as a single source of truth for IoT data. Furthermore, with all IoT data stored in a central location, organizations become empowered to gain actionable insights from their IoT landscape.
Digital Twins as the Future of IoT As we continue to move toward a data-driven future, the use cases for both IoT and digital twins are rapidly expanding. However, we need to pair IoT technology with digital twins to extract the most value from these increasingly exciting IoT applications. Digital twin simulations allow companies to innovate, optimize, and cut costs more effectively and rapidly. Hence, we expect to see digital twins become a top priority for most organizations in their digital transformation journey.
