Five game-changing digital twin applications transforming industries

Exploring the Most Impactful Digital Twin Applications Across Industries

What connects the human heart, a city in Sweden, and the path an invoice takes through Accounts Payable?

You guessed it: they all have digital twins.

Today, virtual models of objects and systems are being put to groundbreaking use by everyone from medical device developers to urban planners. At the same time, a whole other species of digital twin is on the rise – one that’s helping organizations to optimize their processes, whatever industry they call home.

This rapid proliferation of digital twin applications is expected to push the global market for digital twin technologies to $73.5 billion by 2027. Here are just a few of the ways digital twins are replicating and reshaping our world.

Digital twin application 1: Modeling everything in a factory

Imagine you’re standing in one of today’s most cutting-edge factories. As you look around, almost everything your eye falls on will have a virtual version, usually fueled by real-time data from Internet of Things (IoT) sensors on its real-life counterpart:

• Components within the product (these will have “component twins”)
• The product itself (this will have an “asset twin”)
• The machines making the product (these will have asset twins, too)
• The assembly line (“system twins” model how asset twins work together)

McKinsey reports that, in more advanced industries such as automotive and aerospace, almost 75% of companies are already using fairly complex digital twin technology.

Fed with live information, such digital twins give manufacturers an invaluable, real-time view of factory operations. They also grant the power to simulate different scenarios and answer ‘what if…’ questions without the cost and risk of actually altering production. Questions like:

• What happens if we swap out this component?
• How will our product function under extreme conditions?
• Which of our machines need maintenance — and when should we schedule it?
• How can we minimize production bottlenecks?

In this way, digital twins support smart manufacturing initiatives, and help companies make faster, smarter decisions on everything from product design and floor layouts, to predictive maintenance and production scheduling.

But some manufacturers are taking digital twin technology one step further. They’re using it to visualize and optimize factories before they’re even built.

JetZero is a great example. With its “blended wing” aircraft, the aviation industry startup is on a mission to unlock unimagined levels of fuel efficiency. And its approach to building this new type of plane is just as pioneering. JetZero intends to create digital twins of both the aircraft itself and the operations involved in its manufacture. These will help the company to validate and derisk its plans before the first digger rolls onto its greenfield factory site.

At its Regensburg factory, BMW Group is also busy modeling manufacturing operations that don’t even exist. Donning VR goggles, vehicle assemblers can practice tasks inside a digital twin of the factory’s future layout. At their side are virtual employees, created by BMW Group to help assess and improve the ergonomics of tomorrow’s assembly line.

Digital twin application 2: Optimizing electric vehicles

When it comes to applying digital twin tech, the automotive industry has always been ahead of the curve.

Famously, every Tesla sold has its own digital twin, used to predict faults and breakdowns and minimize maintenance. Ferrari’s latest hypercar uses a digital twin to adjust performance in real time, simulating its circumstances, predicting its behaviour, and tweaking parameters to improve stability.

Porsche Engineering, meanwhile, is applying digital twins technology to help it accelerate the electric vehicle revolution.

Increasingly, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) are being asked to improve the durability of their vehicles’ batteries. But this isn’t easy to achieve. While most have decades of data on how a combustion engine ages, they know relatively little about how a high-voltage cell will perform after years on the road.

Enter the digital twin. Porsche Engineering is modeling a high-voltage battery, combining AI algorithms with data from the laboratory and the field. This “general Battery Digital Twin” will help the company’s engineers understand how their electric batteries will age, providing the insight needed to improve performance and service life.

Eventually, the individual batteries in our electric cars may have digital twins too, helping OEMs to provide timely advice on extending our batteries’ lives.

Digital twin application 3: Developing safer medical devices

Digital twin applications in life sciences and pharma are some of the most profound you’ll find.

What if a medical device manufacturer could test its new stent, or prosthetic valve, on an incredibly diverse sample of patients — without implanting it into a single heart? That’s the vision of medtech company Adsilico. It’s combining digital twins with artificial intelligence (specifically, generative AI) to create virtual models of human hearts that reflect patient attributes like weight, age, and health conditions.

By implanting a virtual replica of a new product into Adsilico’s virtual organs, a medical device manufacturer can test performance for thousands of potential patients, rather than the hundreds typically involved in human trials.

Innovative digital twin applications like these promise not only to save lives, but to reduce the cost and waste of new product development, while shortening time to market.

Digital twin application 4: Personalizing healthcare

Now, let’s say you have a digital representation of your own heart. Suddenly, the door opens to a world of digital twin applications for personalized healthcare.

Researchers in the UK are using wearable and implanted monitors to build virtual versions of the hearts of a group of chronically ill patients. They’ll consult each patient's digital twin model to assess the efficacy of medication and predict changes in their health.

More broadly, cardiovascular digital twins are expected to provide a host of benefits for the prevention and treatment of disease. By consulting your heart’s virtual twin, healthcare professionals will be able to:

• Evaluate the possibility of adverse events, like stroke or heart failure
• Better understand your baseline health, improving diagnosis accuracy
• Simulate the outcome of different medical interventions

Digital twin application 5: Building better cities

Digital twins are also changing the way public sector authorities respond to the challenges of urban planning.

The Swedish city of Gothenburg is evolving so rapidly, for example, the City Planning Authority (CPA) has created Virtual Gothenburg: a digital model of the entire 700 square-kilometer municipality.

Replicating every building, lampost and flowerbed, and drawing real-time data from public transport systems, Virtual Gothenburg helps the CPA understand what’s happening in the city right now, and what might happen in a moment’s time.

Torrential rains, new buildings, public events — they can all be simulated in Virtual Gothenburg to inform planning decisions. The model may even be used to train autonomous vehicles before they’re given the run of the real smart city’s roads.

The process digital twin: a twin for every industry

Not every digital twin replicates a physical object. Indeed, one of the most important developments in digital twin tech has been the rise of the process digital twin.

Like other digital twins, process digital twins (also known as process twins) model something real and are fed with real time data. But instead of modeling a real heart, or a real city, they model a real process.

From your ´entire Order-to-Cash process, to a subprocess within your Supply Chain or Inventory Management operations, you can create a virtual replica of how a process actually works, across systems and departments. These digital twins unlock valuable insights, letting you rapidly identify, evaluate, and prioritize actions to improve efficiency.

The most exciting thing about process digital twin applications is that they aren’t limited to a specific industry. Every organization stands to benefit from modeling its core processes, and uncovering opportunities make them even more effective.

Find out how Celonis can empower your organization with an end-to-end process digital twin.