Digital Twin – a concept worth exploring

Although introduced in an engineering setting almost 20 years ago the Digital Twin concept is still highly relevant and worth exploring. However, as is often the case with tech buzzwords, the more popular and widely used they become, the harder it gets to define them precisely and to distinguish between the smoke and mirrors of marketing and the real potential of the original concept.

In fact, some of the people putting serious work into the Digital Twins concept are working at Data Respons and its subsidiaries. What they’re doing may not fit exactly into the strict definition of the concept put forward by Michael Grieves in 2003. But still it’s all about digital representations of physical objects, processes or systems, and the interaction between objects and their digital shadow or counterpart.

For instance when you take a look at MicroDoc, one of the German subsidiaries of Data Respons, working mainly in the automotive sector. When working in the vehicle telematics area MicroDoc uses Digital Twins to display properties of the telematics units in for instance trucks. On the backend side the individual micro services can work with the twin without having to care about the actual hardware. The twin in the truck will be updated as soon as it connects to the backend.
– We call it a Device Twin, says Nicolas Helou, software architect and developer at MicroDoc.
– Our device management in the backend consists of a database and a number of services around it. The device management knows all these telematics devices in the trucks and knows their current state and configuration.

– We have organized this data in the Device Twins. The Device Twin is also a digital representation, but in this case, mostly of the configuration and the operating states of the devices in the truck. If you want to change the configuration of the telematics device in the truck, you talk to the Device Twin. You can change the configuration in the Device Twin and then it will synchronize this data with the device in the truck. If the device is not turned on at the moment, the Device Twin will just keep the information, and transmit it when the device is active.

– Another technology we’re working with, resembling the Digital Twin concept, is something we call Health Monitoring: On a regular basis each device sends information to the backend about CPU usage, memory usage and other properties, which are all related to the health of the device. We can see if it works as it should, and all the health data is collected in the backend, where we have a graphic representation of all the devices in the system and their current state, both of every single device and of the system as a whole.