The Industrial Internet Breaks Away From "Virtual" To "Real" Digital Twin To Meet The Development Window Period

Digital twin is becoming an important driving force for enterprises to realize transformation and create value. By establishing a real-time connection between the physical world and the digital world, enterprises can use digital twin to realize the whole life cycle management of products. This is helpful for enterprises to quickly find and solve problems, speed up the new product listing speed, improve product quality, optimize operation, and develop new business model and increase revenue.

Recently, Shugen Internet and Gartner jointly released a white paper on how to use digital twins to help enterprises create value. Gartner predicts that by 2021% of these industrial twins will be used. By 2024, more than 25% of the new digital twins will be adopted as the binding function of the new lot (Internet of things) native business applications.

On August 12, Luo Lingwen, marketing director of Shugen Internet, said in an interview with 21st century economic report: "there are many slogans and many concepts in the industrial Internet industry. The white paper provides a clearer understanding of the concept of digital industrial transformation for domestic and foreign enterprises, and provides some reference for domestic and foreign enterprises in terms of the concept of digital industrial transformation. "

According to Luo Lingwen, the white paper focuses on the digital twin, which is highly concerned by the industry in recent years, interprets the commercial value of this cutting-edge technology, and points out the differentiated paths for different enterprises to apply the digital twin by combining with the practical results of Shugen interconnection, a leading domestic industrial Internet platform A detailed "guide" is provided.

Differentiated development

Digital twin is the digital image of physical entity. In short, it is to use digital technology to map the information of objects, systems and processes in the digital system in real time, and create a digital version of "clone" for virtual simulation of products, manufacturing and even factories, which is the underlying logic and strong support for promoting product innovation and performance improvement. Digital twins can also be the mapping of organizations or processes in the digital world, such as order response, inventory tracking, stock out avoidance, cost of goods sold, energy cost of goods sold, etc.

With the deep integration and development of new generation information technology and manufacturing industry, industrial Internet has become the starting point of manufacturing industry from "obvious" to "hidden", and the carrier of Internet from "virtual" to "real". It is in this process that digital twin has become one of the key technologies of industrial Internet.

"In the industrial Internet platform, the digital twin is located in the PAAS (platform as a service) layer and appears in the form of API (application program interface). In addition to simply collecting and networking the operation data of physical entities, it also embeds diagnosis, prediction and decision-making models based on professional domain knowledge and production management experience, and then outputs enterprise process optimization scheme and operation management decision-making Solutions. " Luo Lingwen said.

"Therefore, the digital industrial platform is an important twin of the Internet." Li Wei, general manager of Guangdong Xirui Digital Technology Co., Ltd., pointed out that with the emergence of the industrial Internet, the connectivity utility of the network makes the digital twins begin to associate and complement each other in equipment asset management, product life cycle management and manufacturing process management. For example, the industrial Internet platform is used to associate the edge infrastructure with the digital twin downward, and the data is transferred and stored in the cloud. Other users can also establish the digital twin through the platform services according to their own needs.

Luo Lingwen suggested that "industrial Internet related enterprises need to increase the number of device connections and build the model mechanism of different process links of the above scenarios around industrial application scenarios, such as intelligent research and development, intelligent production, intelligent management, intelligent service and industrial collaboration, so as to have more high-level applications and benefits."

It is worth noting that the "white paper" puts forward the path of differential construction of digital twins for enterprises of different sizes.

Large enterprises often have a huge structure, with a variety of it and ot subsystems. This type of enterprise can independently deploy the industrial Internet platform to integrate and calculate the corresponding digital twins of all levels of indicators for enterprises, and integrate and exchange data with various business systems in the form of micro services, so as to greatly improve the speed of enterprise digital transformation, reduce costs and risks. Small enterprises are often inefficient in operation and lack of funds. In this regard, the white paper suggests that the industrial Internet platform of public cloud can be used to quickly improve the ability of enterprises with small cost.

Commercial landing

Digital twin is the digital expression of real world objects or systems, which can be applied in smart city, intelligent transportation, industrial intelligent manufacturing and even literary entertainment.

Luo Lingwen predicted: "with the wide application of the Internet of things, there will be 21 billion sensors and end access points connected together by 2020. In the near future, billions of objects will have digital twin models."

In fact, with the increasing popularity of digital twin applications, the white paper points out that 13% of respondents who have deployed IOT claim to have implemented digital twins, and 62% of them are implementing or planning to implement digital twins in 2020.

With the popularity of big data, artificial intelligence, 5g, edge computing and other new technologies, the scene of digital twin is constantly enriched. The development of PLM (product life cycle management) system, CAD (Computer Aided Design) system, manufacturing process management and manufacturing execution system (MES) technology has also accelerated the landing of digital twin in manufacturing industry.

At present, tree root interconnection has applied digital twin in many industrial Internet landing cases. Taking Sany group as an example, Sany group began to lay out digital twin technology in 2008, so as to realize the "product + service" combination strategy and compete with international giants. According to the operation data of tree root interconnection, the industrial transformation realized in the scenarios of intelligent service, intelligent R & D, intelligent factory, financial innovation and so on, finally brought obvious benefits to Sany group.

According to the white paper, the digital twin intelligent service based on IOT has a positive impact of 33% on the improvement of response; the IOT data modeling based on Fault Modeling and equipment operation has a 55% direct benefit impact on improving the accuracy of spare parts prediction. The response time of engineers was shortened from 300 minutes to 15 minutes, and the main service area arrived at the site in 2 hours, and the repair was completed in 24 hours. The inventory of spare parts in the channel was reduced by 300 million yuan, and the one-time repair rate was increased from 75% to 92%.

Luo Lingwen pointed out: "the key word of the future of digital twin is open. The open API in digital twin architecture can provide DT (data processing technology) ecosystem with object model API, DT model API, order dispatch API, mechanism model API and mathematical / data model API."

However, as an open and sharing emerging technology, digital twin is bound to face a series of network security risks and challenges in the process of accelerating the integration with the Internet. "To carry out the construction of network security management system in the field of digital twin, study and judge risks in advance and formulate countermeasures will also become necessary measures and development direction to promote the development of digital twin related technologies." Li Wei added.

In addition, Luo Lingwen reminded that the barrier to the industrialization of digital twin lies in the number of connected devices. "Digital twin technology is now more used in the development of high-value equipment, such as aircraft. However, if a few thousand pieces of equipment, such as sewing machine, is applied to digital twin technology, the cost of a single machine will increase sharply, and few customers are willing to pay for it. The more devices are connected, it is possible to apportion the technical costs and apply them to more equipment with relatively low prices. "

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