Potential business applications of digital twin technology

Abstract

In the digital transformation era of industry 4.0, technological advancements are happening in a rapid phase that is changing the way of services offered by the business and the decision-making process backed up with the firm data and analysts predicting the market condition in the future. One such revolutionary advancements are happening with the digital twin technology, which enables the industrialists, researchers, technical specialists with a powerful tool of connecting the physical object with the virtual twin of it and gather the information well before the occurrence of the incidents. The digital twin can connect with the physical object in a feedback mode and provide corrective actions & diagnostics when required without the human presence. During pandemic times, various sectors and companies have faced challenging times and came to a standstill position due to their limitation of availability of the employees with their physical presence at the workstations. Pandemic taught us many critical lessons and opened a wide variety of opportunities for solutions and offerings that can be made with technology to overcome the restrictions of human presence. Such situations have raised the digital twin need and their applications to be used further in many sectors that have not used them before. The expansion and the wonders of the digital twin can create by collaborating and using other techniques such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine learning, cloud computing, processing speed, Virtual Reality, Artificial Reality has created a lot of scope to research and study. In this paper, we try to understand what the digital twin is and how it evolved with the timeline, its advantages, and its current applications. We have further tried to identify the opportunities laid for the digital twin in the future and what challenges it faces to turn into reality.