The Multiple Faces of Digital Twins

Digital twins are emerging as a hot technology, particularly among manufacturers and companies involved with the Industrial Internet of Things. Depending on the use cases, though, customers may opt for one type of digital twin over another. To a certain extent, every digital twin is a unique creation. The ability to create a digitized copy of an actual physical asset, such as a wind turbine or a locomotive, and measure how that model responds and reacts to different inputs is the fundamental breakthrough that is driving adoption of digital twin technologies. But there are a few broad categories of digital twins, and companies that are considering adopting a digital twin would do well to explore how their use cases match up to these types.