Digital Twins Can Improve Supply Chain Resilience and Agility - AI Trends

Some elements of what we now call digital twins reach back into the early days of industrial computing. Data historians, PLC's and instrumented processes have been a part of large industrial systems for some time. Process manufacturers in energy, resources, chemicals, food, and pharmaceutical markets have instrumented the environment for safety, efficiency, and regulatory compliance for as long as we have used computers in industry. This data provided some level of benefit in terms of meeting compliance requirements and improving maintenance and uptime through alerts and analytics, but it was also difficult to work with and expensive to deploy and manage. Contemporary digital twins are an entirely different animal.