Digital Twins for Industries
Digital twin continues to be a trend gaining momentum in the IoT industry. I’ve written in the past about how some of the key IoT platform vendors are embracing the concept of digital twins. More recently, I am seeing a trend for companies to develop and market digital twins for specific industries.
Some examples:
Digital Twins for Infrastructure
Bentley has created a digital twin platform, called iTwin, that creates digital twins for infrastructure asset operators. They use digital twins to help align the information required to design and operate infrastructure assets. They have open sourced some of the technology in a project called iModel.js.
Digital Twins for Shipbuilding
Rolls-Royce and others announced the Open Simulation Platform for designing new ships.
Digital Twin for Manufacturing
Mevea provides digital twin simulation software for the manufacturing industry. They provide a physics engine to simulate mechanics, hydraulic, power transmission and operating environment for a machine under design.
Digital Twin for Warehouses
Conduce creates digital twins for warehouses. They appear to be doing a pilot with DHL .
Digital Twin for Building Environments
Willow creates digital twins of buildings. Interesting that it operates on the MS Azure Digital Twin service.
NavVis is also building digital twins from indoor spatial data to model building environments.
Digital Twin for Telecoms
It would appear Nokia is working on a digital twin solution for telecoms.
I expect to see the major IoT platform vendors enhancing their digital twin services in 2019. However, it will also be interesting to watch as more vertically aligned digital twin solutions are brought to market.