Digital twin

Doing so allows the benefits of virtualization to be extended to domains such as inventory management including lean manufacturing, machinery crash avoidance, tooling design, troubleshooting, and preventive maintenance.

[5] The broader idea that became the digital twin concept was anticipated by David Gelernter's 1991 book Mirror Worlds.

The digital twin is disrupting the entire product lifecycle management (PLM), from design, to manufacturing, to service and operations.

Thousands of sensors are being placed throughout the physical manufacturing process, all collecting data from different dimensions, such as environmental conditions, behavioural characteristics of the machine and work that is being performed.

[16] Advanced ways of product and asset maintenance and management come within reach as there is a digital twin of the real 'thing' with real-time capabilities.

[18] Digital twins offer a great amount of business potential by predicting the future instead of analyzing the past of the manufacturing process.

Lastly, connectivity like the internet of things, makes the closing of the digitalization loop possible, by then allowing the following cycle of product design and promotion to be optimized for higher performance.

They support health monitoring, ergonomic risk assessment, and predictive maintenance of structures like bridges and historical buildings.

[23] Visualization technologies such as augmented reality (AR) systems are being used as both collaborative tools for design and planning in the built environment integrating data feeds from embedded sensors in cities[24] and API services to form digital twins.

For example, AR can be used to create augmented reality maps, buildings, and data feeds projected onto tabletops for collaborative viewing by built environment professionals.

[25] In the built environment, partly through the adoption of building information modeling (BIM) processes, planning, design, construction, and operation and maintenance activities are increasingly being digitised, and digital twins of built assets are seen as a logical extension - at an individual asset level and at a national level.

[28] Digital twins have also been proposed as a method to reduce the need for visual inspections of buildings and infrastructure after earthquakes by using unmanned vehicles to gather data to be added to a virtual model of the affected area.

[15] With a digital twin, lives can be improved in terms of medical health, sports and education by taking a more data-driven approach to healthcare.

The availability of technologies makes it possible to build personalized models for patients, continuously adjustable based on tracked health and lifestyle parameters.

Furthermore, the digital twin enables individual's records to be compared to the population in order to easier find patterns with great detail.

Digital twins in the automobile industry are implemented by using existing data in order to facilitate processes and reduce marginal costs.