
Digital Twins Are Reinventing Innovation - sarapeyton
https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/how-digital-twins-are-reinventing-innovation/
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nathan_compton
"Reinventing Innovation" is an absurdly vacuous phrase.

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lonelappde
We need to innovate on reinvention.

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vonnik
Disclosure: My company, Pathmind, works in a space adjacent to digital twins.

Digital twins are an interesting idea that, like "cognitive computing", is
easily abused by marketing, and will probably rake in a lot of consulting fees
for people like the authors of this piece (Accenture Research) and companies
like IBM.

The essence of a digital twin is a simulation complex enough to be useful in
making predictions in the real world. (That's the "twin" part.) Making complex
simulations, as you might imagine, is difficult. It requires effort, deep
domain knowledge (rare talent), good feedback mechanisms with the real
situation in question, and some means of managing that complexity.

Digital twins do exist in deployment. What differentiates them from, say, any
old machine-learning model you might use for predictions is that a "digital
twin" is probably used for a more complex task than just classification. That
is, it's probably used to direct the actions of a system. The words imply a
larger solution.

So one thing you see is simulations that embed machine-learning models and
predict what actions to take in a given state. Think of it like AlphaGo
applied to business scenarios.

What are the pitfalls? Real-world data in these environments is non-stationary
and messy, so signal may be low, or the ways you find signal might change over
time.

To make the "digital twin" useful you are probably integrating with large
software systems not entirely in your control, which may be hard to reason
about (ERP systems like SAP).

The digital twin idea, insofar as it includes large parametric models that
depend on algorithms like deep reinforcement learning, matters now, because
those models are able to find structure in complexity, and make ever more
accurate predictions about what to do. That is, we're able to identify optimal
actions in more complex situations, with techniques more sophisticated than
expert systems.

All that aside, this sort of thing is already getting deployed under the right
circumstances, and you could argue that it is the future of a lot of business
operations in supply chain and manufacturing.

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heyitsguay
Very interesting. Do you have a sense of which businesses are working in
digital twinning successfully?

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vonnik
We see it up and down the supply chain, from manufacturing to warehouses to
transport nodes.

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heyitsguay
Cool! What companies do the twinning? Is it handled in-house by the companies
applying it or are they partnering with specialists?

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ptrott2017
Companies like GE, SAP, Mathworks, Dassault, PTC and Siemens all have digital
twin platforms used by major manufacturers. Initially there was a period (2003
-2013) where twin systems were built my specialist media developers using 3rd
party authoring tools and integrating with different system simulation tools.
While this still happens for specialist or niche projects (or sometimes on
very large projects with specific deadlines that require outsourced help).
Increasingly most manufacturers build digital twins directy from design assets
(CAD, CAM, Systems simulations etc) as part of the in-house product
development process using extensions to their existing design and simulation
tooling.

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vonnik
@ptrott2017 - i'd love to speak with you about this. please ping me at chris
at pathmind dot com if you're open to a conversation.

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sorryitstrue
I believe Digital Twin was crowned buzzword of the 2019 by Gartner

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slumdev
I thought the article would be about the Winklevoss brothers.

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jojo2000
In the era of "all digital", one must be very careful to make the future anew,
not a copy of the past.

Our models of system are only a pale reproduction of how those systems work,
rendering designs that are tuned by those "evil twins" bound by our current
understanding of the system which can be lacking sometimes.

Nevertheless, in engineering, notably aerospace for example, those digital
twins are crucial to make better parts, as thrusters for example, do not allow
for continuous measurements of temperature (everything burns there).

It rendered hardware system design far more agile.

Yet the concepts to build a novel hardware is not encoded in this simulation.

Another example of "future is past, repeated" is machine learning. Carrying
encoded stereotypes in predictions.

As we try to model everything with some notable failures, such as economy,
let's just be aware of the limitations of those models.

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yonderboy
Interesting that the authors don't mention the book Mirror Worlds
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_world](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_world)),
but the last line of the article does make an allusion to it.

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lonelappde
It's called a cookie.

[https://black-mirror.fandom.com/wiki/Cookie](https://black-
mirror.fandom.com/wiki/Cookie)

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pmichelman
Interesting take. I think it's hard for some companies to imagine how
transformative the technology can be. This is a good starting point.

