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Digital Twin and Simulation

Predicting the future with your data ...

What is Digital Twin technology?

A Digital Twin is a simulated portrayal of an authentic entity or system. A virtual representation of real-world objects, physical assets or systems.

How can you create your own Digital Twin?

Linking your data in Compass: EngineTM is just the start of the journey.

Our enterprise solutions unlock simulation workflows that enable the creation of a closed loop Digital Twin.

Take your intelligence to new levels.

Our Digital Twin Blog Series

Slingshot Simulations is defining the industry with our founder and UK branch leadership role in the internationally recognised Digital Twin Consortium. 

What can Digital Twins do?

The term digital twin is becoming pervasive across all industry sectors driven by trends such as the Internet of Things and Industry 4.0 and is also being realised in applications as diverse as wind farms, jet engines and even supply chain management.

Yet not everyone’s definition of a digital twin is the same. Many will focus on the things you can do with the virtual representation such as build machine learning, artificial intelligence, analytics and simulations to describe and predict the behaviour of this virtual representation.

 

Digital Twin Strip
Slingshot's Own Mobius Strip Concept- Representation of Digital Twin Industries
doors opening to a digital world

The reality is that a digital twin is all this and more. Here at Slingshot Simulations we align with the definition developed over time by the industry led Digital Twin Consortium:

 

  • Digital twin systems transform business by accelerating holistic understanding, optimal decision-making, and effective action.
  • Digital twins use real-time and historical data to represent the past and present and simulate predicted futures.
  • Digital twins are motivated by outcomes, tailored to use cases, powered by integration, built on data, guided by domain knowledge, and implemented in IT/OT systems.
Digital Twin Company Consortium Logo

Industry Groundbreakers

Our leadership role within the DTC allows us to work alongside industry figures, like Dell Technologies and Microsoft, to define the reference architecture for digital twins. 

The IP underpinning our Compass: EngineTM  platform delivers unique capability for highly efficient large scale data, simulation and digital twins.

Why are Digital Twins important?

The Digital Twin concept promises to deliver significant impact and benefit across all areas from business to human health to sustainability and more. The leadership of most organisations agree that this strategic technology trend is something they should be implementing to create business value through better more innovative solutions for their customers, reduced costs and increased competitiveness – all through product or process improvement, predictive and prescriptive maintenance for better, more cost effective asset management and real world, real time performance insights that accelerate new product or solution introduction.

By experimenting on a virtual representation, improvements and interventions can be examined and simulated in the Digital Twin before they are implemented in the real world – predicting the future to dramatically reduce the costs of change and de-risking the intervention.

Digital Twin City Image
Using Digital Twin Tech

And importantly, digital twins are now being used as part of organisation’s ESG initiatives to address sustainability concerns by exploring and helping develop net zero and decarbonisation strategies – in areas as diverse as future mobility, industrial processes, supply chain analysis or developing waste minimisation techniques.

As it has been reported, the recent global pandemic has accelerated global digital transformation by almost a decade. Without technologies such as Digital Twins that allowed workers to operate remotely and often in virtual environments, the economic consequences of the pandemic would likely have been far worse.

How can Slingshot Simulations help?

Slingshot Simulations Spaceman Logo

Achieving a functioning digital twin is typically a journey rather than a step change. The first stage consists of developing a virtual representation or model of the real world entity to be twinned. The data that defines and influences the behaviour of the real world then needs to be captured and somehow connected into the virtual representation – for example through sensors that stream data into the model or historic performance data etc. These data then form the basis of the myriad types of analysis that can be performed – from simple statistical analysis to advanced machine learning, artificial intelligence and simulations. The outputs from these analytics then need to be synthesised and visualised in an appropriate way so that key stakeholders can implement the key changes in the physical world to achieve their desired outcomes and KPIs.

Slingshot Simulations’ Compass: Engine TM solution provides a comprehensive end to end digital twin solutions with unique capabilities. It can ingest digital models of physical assets (from the scale of a single product to a city and even a continent) and processes (such as business process maps or models) and uniquely link all the disparate data sources that shape the behaviour of the real world asset or process. Based on the maturity of adoption of digital twin solutions, it is our experience that most organisations now have a digital model available and are capturing the data that defines its behaviour. The biggest challenge they face in launching their digital twin project is in efficiently bringing all this disparate data together so that it can be used as the basis for their analytics. With the Compass: EngineTM  unique graph-based approach to data linking and discovery, we typically find we can help digital twin teams reduce the time this data connectivity process takes by up to 80%
Pie Chart Showing 80% Saved Time
Sustainable Digital Twin
Once the data is ingested, linked and contextualised, Compass: EngineTM  provides a no code analytics workflow environment with capabilities that span simple statistical interrogation to machine learning, artificial intelligence and the ability to integrate 3rd party or inhouse developed simulations. This makes it easy for digital twin teams to democratise the use of the technology beyond the often constrained resources of the data science and digital teams and get the power of the technology in the hands of the end users across different business units. And of course, the outputs of the analytics need to be visualised in compelling ways so that stakeholders can experience the data in a way that they can interpret and initiate the required actions back in the real world. With Compass: Engine’sTM  dashboarding application, standard charts and graphs can be produced or passed through to common business intelligence platforms and even into AR/VR experiences. In addition, results and projects can be shared simply through email direct from within the platform.

What is the future for Digital Twins?

While Digital Twin technologies have their origins in and have been pioneered by engineering heavy industries with high value, long lifecycle assets, such as aerospace and defence, industrial equipment and energy, opportunities are now arising across many more industry sectors and beyond engineering – to include business processes. A Digital Twin in these original scenarios exists to twin a tangible, physical object. However a Business Process Digital Twin captures the complexities of the flow of data through a process or series of transactions, as in a distribution centre or call centre, to derive unknown insights and identify process changes that can be scaled across an enterprise’s operations.

coding on a computer
a tree growing through a city

This Business Process Digital Twin or system of Digital Process Modelling would improve efficiency and provide better business and customer experiences. For example, mapping analytics, dissecting patterns and simulating the processes within a mobile call centre or a product factory. The closed loop Business Process Digital Twin therefore also allows continuous improvement through continuous integrated simulation and analytics..

Furthermore, through the continuous and rapidly increasing integration of Digital Twin technologies. We will inevitably see integrated, interconnected and unified Digital Twin systems, across a wide range of mediums. These future system-of-systems digital twin examples will also look at providing larger scale results by integrating a series of multiple digital twins into a holistic view.

For example, individual building management Digital Twins provided from the construction of new smart buildings could be combined at city level, alongside national electricity infrastructure twins, to monitor and predict the impact on local energy grid demand. Personal Digital Twins may be utlised within healthcare on an individual level as the metaverse of digitalisation continually increases.

Digital Twins in various forms are likely to form the basis of the emerging metaverse, omniverse and web 3.0 experiences.

The opportunities for digital transformation are constantly arising and, from a Digital Twin standpoint, can be limitless.

Digital Twins Background

Digital Twin and Simulation News:

empty reservoir showing a UK drought

Leeds-based simulation start-up offers water-saving solution to all UK water companies

Megan Johnson 16th August 2022

Slingshot Simulations, Leeds-based simulation start-up and tech company based in the Nexus Building, have offered a ground-breaking solution to water companies in the UK. In the face of drought announcements and hosepipe bans, the CEO of Slingshot Simulations, David McKee, has personally written to water companies to offer a technical solution. After the driest July since 1935 and temperatures rising over 40C for the first time, areas in England are in need of a solution. Slingshot Compass: Engine Geospatial Visualisation of UK areas in Drought and at risk Slingshot Simulations, which specialises in Digital Twins – digital replicas of real-world

Read More »
doors opening to a digital world

Digital Twin Consortium pursues open source collaboration

David McKee 16th June 2021

We’re excited to be supporting the Open Source initiative at the Digital Twin Consortium with the vision to tackle a core challenge of the current state-of-the-art being the lack of ability to collaborate and integrate across vendors. There is no multi-vendor open standard for a digital twin that can be used by third parties, and there is currently no such thing as an open multi-vendor digital twin integration framework Peter Havart-Simkin, Gartner   Our CEO Dr David McKee has been chairing, working closely with the consortium’s CTO Dan Isaacs and Dr Said Tabet from DELL Technologies, the open source and

Read More »

Digital Thread and the Digital Twin

Slingshot Simulations 17th March 2021

Where does the digital thread start within the digital twin? Our CEO David joins John Turner from Gafcon, Inc. for a Digital Twin Consortium point counter-point debate: As part of the Digital Twin Consortium’s Point Counterpoint video series, Slingshot’s CEO, CTO & Founder Dr David McKee goes head to head with John Tuner, VP of Innovative Solutions at Gafcon to discuss at what point does the digital thread start within the digital twin? What are digital threads and digital twins? Computer software company PTC aply describes a digital thread as threads that seek to create homogeneity and simple universal access to data. They follow a single set of

Read More »

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