Metaverse of BIMness - The Digital Twin Saga

Welcome back to the second instalment of the Metaverse of BIMness – the chapter on Digital Twins.

In my previous article, I attempted to compile a comprehensive grasp of the Metaverse as a whole. In subsequent editions, including this one, I will attempt to clarify specific points or items that will have a significant impact on the Metaverse. In this session, I'd like to focus on the Digital Twin.

So, before I try to describe what a Digital Twin is and how it fits into the Metaverse, let's first understand what it is.

A digital twin is a virtual representation of a physical object or activity that acts as its real-time digital equivalent. Though the notion had been around for a while, NASA came up with the first realistic definition of digital twin in 2010 as part of an effort to improve physical model simulation of spacecraft.

Let's discuss about what a digital twin can achieve for you?

Model it first:

Modeling something, such as the physical environment, is one of the first things you can do. That can include buildings, energy distribution, grids, warehouses, and factories, among other things.

Once it's been modelled, the most crucial or intriguing part is to bring that digital counterpart to life and synchronise it with the physical world. You can start applying software approaches to that model once you've synchronised it with the physical world.

·        Now: One of the first things you can do is use the digital counterpart to monitor the physical environment. It gives you operational visibility into what's going on in these environments at any given time.

·        The Past: The next thing you can do is look into its history.

·        The Future: Once you've traced its past, you can use analytic programmes to uncover insights regarding previous states, abnormalities, and anything else that's significant to you in the physical representation that this digital copy represents. And this allows you to do something quite powerful: you can begin to forecast future conditions.

Start Analyze and Simulate:

You may begin to anticipate when equipment will require service before it occurs, and you can begin to anticipate occupancy requirements before they occur. You can now anticipate the future states of everything that can be analysed using software. "Simulation" is the final nail in the coffin. The digital twin can be duplicated via simulation. That’s effectively is the operational visibility of that physical environment, as well as the ability to duplicate it and conduct simulations on it. The purpose of these simulations can then be to uncover optimizations that are too complicated to be specified only by observing the physical environment. All of this may be done using the digital twin's software copy and then when the simulation is over , you can apply the insights that you gained on the copy of that digital twin back to the real digital twin and affect inputs into the physical environment.

Here Comes the benefit:

·        Once you've done that, you'll be able to start providing autonomous control. You can begin automating mundane and repetitive tasks. Improve them over time with systems that learn and improve. This improves and optimises the physical environment.

·        Interacting with this is, one of the most powerful things you can do with it. You can interact with the digital replica that is superimposed on the real world. This digital copy can provide you with detailed metadata and insights into anything you're doing in the physical world.

·        You can also interact with colleagues and experts from all over the world in pure virtual space over long distances.

Sounds a bit futuristic!!!... let’s see how a real life experience should look like:

This is exemplified by Anheuser Busch in Bev.

Are you unfamiliar with this business?

Have you tried Budweiser before? It's from this firm.

They're committed to maintaining the highest levels of quality and consistency. They're experts at what they do in process manufacturing, and they're leveraging the entire stack to improve things dramatically.

Anheuser Busch in Bev is the world's largest brewer, with more than 200 breweries and 160,000 employees around the world. It has an unrivalled portfolio of brands and a global presence with operations in 50 markets. With their digital factory and supply chain of the future initiatives in collaboration with Microsoft, they are an expert in their field and their forward-thinking and innovative spirit is leading to new breakthroughs in brewing.

AB in Bev. is dedicated to transforming breweries and their global operations by equipping frontline employees with digital solutions that enable world-class manufacturing, mobility, data automation, and business intelligence.

It all starts with AI, Azure Digital Twins, and the Microsoft Cloud bringing the brewery to life.

The Brew Master is in charge of producing the highest quality beer in any brewery. He or she has an unrivalled understanding of the brewing process, allowing him or her to predict and monitor the complex chemical and biological fermentation parameters required to produce the highest quality product. The mobile brewery technology built on Azure with built-in energy and utility management solutions allows frontline operations to remotely monitor critical quality and traceability data from manufacturing execution systems. The digital brewery supports AB in Bev's. industry leading sustainable development goals after the perfect batch is ready to be bottled and shipped.

AB in Bev has expanded their digital twin solution to support packaging line operations, ensuring that everything is done correctly. Can plans are using Azure AI and Microsoft Project Bonsai's deep reinforcement learning to provide line balancing optimization that detects and compensates for bottlenecks in complex can manufacturing operations. Predictive maintenance and global support help AB in Bev achieve their goal of 100 percent uptime. A frontline operator can quickly resolve issues by working remotely with a maintenance technician, ensuring that packaging equipment is not shut down unnecessarily. The ideal beer has been packaged and is ready to drink. The use of AV in Bev's future supply chain reduces carbon emissions while ensuring that the right beer reaches the right customer at the right time.

There are numerous names for this now. And it's not just about digital twins. It goes beyond self-driving cars and virtual reality. We're really creating the Metaverse as more companies start to take advantage of these capabilities and interact with each other and partner in these virtual worlds.

Consider our current world. People and automobiles, Businesses, Buildings, hospitals, factories, entire cities, and the billions of devices that link us to the rest of the world. This is the physical world, but what if we could turn it into its digital counterpart?

A digital twin that is constantly connected to the physical world. That is something we can see in mixed reality. With whom we can work together. That we can use to run simulations and figure out what's important to us. That artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to learn, predict, and act. To save time and money, reduce carbon emissions, protect natural resources, increase safety, and bring us all closer together. This is already happening around the world; businesses are capitalising on the new wave of innovation that is trending toward interconnectedness, enabling the Metaverse..

Everything in the Metaverse is modelled to reflect the status of its physical counterpart, including interactions and relationships between things. By utilising the cloud's power, we are able to push the boundaries of what this technology can accomplish. The possibilities are endless.

Data from connected environments can now be tracked and analysed. Patterns, trends, and anomalies must be identified. We can now simulate any scenario and assess the results. Determine how any change or condition will affect you. We can now use AI to perceive the physical world, improve and automate tasks, and empower your employees with superpowers. We can now empower everyone in your organisation to create apps and workflows to collaborate with one another in this virtual space, sharing and receiving expertise at the right time and in the right context. Using mixed reality, you can access relevant information about the physical world's digital counterpart whenever and wherever you need it.