The Future Digital Twin: What Role Will Digital Twin Play in the Next Ten Years?

The future Digital Twin market holds endless potential as it’s becoming a mainstream technology faster. Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic increased the demand for factory and shop floor automation, real-time planning, and better worker augmentation. Hence, Digital Twin technology is no longer a concept but a necessary solution required for industrial growth.

The fastest-growing digital twin applications will create a high impact in 7 industries and determine how they function in the next ten years – manufacturing, automotive, aerospace, healthcare, retail, oil and gas, and industrial IoT.

The Digital Twin is in its emergence as we’ve just begun our journey in the Digital Industrial Era. Yet, we can already see tremendous growth and potential that lies ahead.

The Future Digital Twin Market Forecast:

ResearchandMarkets.com reported that about 36% of executives across various industries understand the benefits of digital twinning. So it’s good news that 18% of these executives are planning to use it in their operations by 2028.

This increasing demand for intelligent solutions will lead to the rise of digital twin marketplaces. ABI Research reported that the digital twin market would grow from US$3.5 billion in 2021 to US$33.9 billion in 2030 at a 29% CAGR.

Read more: What is Digital Twin Technology, and Why is It Essential for Businesses?

The ABI Research also estimated that the global adoption of digital twins would reach 34.9% by 2026. It’s because the future Digital Twin market has such immense potential to support more than 10 million frontline workers in manufacturing. About 35% of manufacturers collect and use data produced by smart sensors to improve manufacturing processes in the USA. 

According to ResearchandMarkets.com, up to 89% of all IoT platforms will include digital twins by 2025. Moreover, Digital twinning will become a standard IoT feature by 2027.

Regional Digital Twin Market Dynamics:

The future Digital Twin market holds prominent shares in various geographical regions around the world. North America has the biggest Digital Twin market and would expand tremendously in the next five years.

Surprisingly, the Asia-Pacific region and Japan will produce lucrative growth opportunities for the digital twin market. It will happen due to a few significant factors:

• Urban population size growing at a steady rate
• Increasing integrations of advanced technologies in the industrial sectors
• Governments are favoring investments and adapting lenient policies to increase manufacturing and production facilities in the 4.0 industries

At present, the USA leads in the adoption of the future digital twins. However, China has the potential to surpass the USA regarding products manufactured using digital twins by 2024.

What leads North America to Dominate the IoT market globally?

The North American region has two developed economies like the USA and Canada. So, it’s no surprise that North America dominates the IoT market in aerospace, automotive, and manufacturing.

These countries heavily invest in developing emerging technologies like digital twins, 3D printing, smart sensors, etc. Moreover, businesses are early adopters of the future digital twin simulation, connectivity, IoT, and AI, into their manufacturing processes.

Manufacturers are upgrading their production methods using connected devices and data flow. In addition, they are using IoT and analytics to operate and boost their companies to remain competitive after the Covid-19 pandemic.

All these factors contribute to the expansion of the IoT market in North America compared to other regions.

Digital Twin Technology Competitive Landscape is Shaped by New Product Launches:

The Digital Twin leaders have launched new solutions to expand their customer base and establish their influence in the industry.

Digital Twin vendors are inclining toward partnerships, mergers, and acquisitions strategies to survive the cut-throat competition. For example, Microsoft Corporation and Ansys Inc agreed to form a joint venture to develop an IoT-enabled digital twin framework in December 2019.

Read more: Is It Possible to Build Digital Twins of Humans?

Bentley Systems Incorporated launched iTwin in October 2019, cloud-based digital twin services to facilitate infrastructure assets and projects. iTwin empowered customers that use two different management software of the company.

Many vendors can provide a few IoT solutions at present. Still, only a few companies are providing customizable end-to-end future Digital Twin solutions, including:

• Hitachi Vantara,
• PTC
• Siemens
• Ansys
• Autodesk
• GE Digital
• Microsoft

Today’s manufacturers are more interested in enhancing their product portfolio by reducing future failures and risks while maximizing productivity. Thus, small and big businesses are tapping into the Digital Twin market to shorten the product launch stages, shaping the competitive landscape.

Challenges of deploying Digital Twin Technology :

Digital Twin Technology is a framework for building a bridge between the physical and digital worlds. This complex framework of solutions involves prototype design, simulation, manufacturing, assembly, and after-sales service and support. Therefore, manufacturers must satisfy a range of requirements to deploy digital twins successfully, including:

• CAD modeling & connectivity
• Cloud computing
• IoT software platforms
• Hardware for shop-floor workers (tablets, AR glasses),
• Physics-based simulation
• Machine learning
• Systems integration
• Remote monitoring

 The biggest challenge of deploying digital twin technology is that it must share the same characteristics as the actual product. With this in mind, the future Digital Twins must have the capabilities to meet some challenges below:

• Must capture the physical properties with its exact size and simulate its behavior according to the real object like a car or a person.
• Embody a human user as an avatar to interact with other avatars or digital twins
• Work collaboratively with its composite internally and with other digital twins externally
• Must have the self-awareness  to respond to changes of size and functionality in real-time and modify itself as needed
• Must detect the execution conflicts and resolve them automatically for uninterrupted communications.

Technological trends of digital twins shaping the future virtual world:

Businesses are interested in exploring the full potential of Digital Twins. They are applying IIoT, semantic technology, VR, and AI in digital twin research. Such experiments are unleashing new technological trends of digital twins shaping the future virtual world that none of us have ever imagined.

Human-Computer Interaction is the New Reality:

One of the newest experimentations of the future Digital Twin includes infusing AR, VR & MR experiences between human and digital twins. In other words, human users will connect with digital twins using senses like sight, sound, touch, and taste.

Semantic Data Modeling in Digital Twin Technology:

The semantic data model structures data logically to give basic meaning to it while highlighting the relationship between them. As a result, it helps to develop application programs quickly. At the same time, it ensures that the applications’ data stays consistent with new updates.

So, semantic technology is used for Digital Twin to improve its design and deployment as follows:

• Provides the logical  framework for data to operate internally
• Manages  large amounts of data coming from diverse data sources efficiently
• Allows the data model to evolve

The Future Digital Twin Technology Infused with AI:

Another trending experiment with Digital Twin includes fusing AI through machine learning, big data, service computing, semantic techniques, IIoT, and autonomous robot. The AI fusion enables the digital twin to gain real-time sense and dive into deep learning for many purposes. 

Currently, Digital twins are capable of performing various tasks successfully. Like:

• Analyzing  data and detecting anomalies
• Automating business processes and simulating scenarios
• Answering questions
• Aiding optimization and faster decision-making

IIoT based sensor technology in the Future Digital Twins:

Many intelligent devices are connected to form systems that monitor, collect, exchange and analyze data in an IIoT network setting. So, IIoT enables Digital Twins to gather and provide input on physical objects using a large amount of data.

It also allows Digital Twins to improve real-time simulation & decision-making capabilities based on analytics focused on multi-channel data.

The Evolving Digital Twin Technology: 

Today’s world is witnessing human-to-human, human-to-object, and object-to-object, interactions in everyday lives.  Such interactions between things trigger events and produce states, leading them to certain conditions.

So, the real world is becoming complex due to technological advances often making the collaboration clustering and chaotic.

In this scenario, industries around the globe are integrating IoT and Digital Twins in the manufacturing process to enhance the performance of devices and equipment. Emerging technology is solving many problems that businesses face at present. Surprisingly, the emerging tech will solve the futuristic issues at a higher level that is yet to occur.

Hence, there is no doubt that the businesses using innovative technologies like IoT, Digital Twin simulation, and AI will make them stand out from the crowd.

A decade earlier, this idea of intelligent machines analyzing, reasoning, and making decisions would seem impossible. Also, intelligent machines interacting with each other while transforming the manually operated industrial systems into automated ones were unimaginable.

However, with the future Digital Twin and IoT, that’s not the case anymore. According to predictions, by 2020-2030, over 50 billion machines will be connected globally with over seven billion internet consumers.

So, the world will be witnessing another mesmerizing internet transformation in the next ten years with emerging technologies.