Digital twin technology creates virtual replicas of physical products and processes, enabling simulations and optimizations without real-world disruptions. Beyond manufacturing, it is being implemented in sectors like energy, hospitality, city management, retail, and healthcare, with significant market growth anticipated. Notable applications include GE's digital wind farms, restaurant layouts for efficiency, city planning models, and personalized healthcare models like Philips' heart model.

1. How Are Digital Twins
5 Real-World Examples
Beyond Manufacturing
Used In Practice:

2. © 2020 Bernard Marr, Bernard Marr & Co. All rights reserved
Title
Text
IntroductionIntroduction
A digital twin is a digital copy of an actual physical product, process, or ecosystem that
can be used to run virtual simulations, using data to update and change the digital copy
to reflect any changes in the real world.
The idea behind a digital twin is to let us see what might happen if we were to make
certain adjustments in real life. These adjustments can be trialed on the digital twin
without having to test potentially expensive changes on the real-world counterpart.
How Are Digital Twins Used In Practice: 5 Real-
World Examples Beyond Manufacturing

3. © 2020 Bernard Marr, Bernard Marr & Co. All rights reserved
Although the term “digital twin” was first coined in 2002, the concept itself goes back
further. NASA pioneered this idea of working with digital models of real-world systems
during its Apollo missions. Being able to create accurate simulations, based on real-world
data, played a significant role in helping NASA bring its astronauts safely back to Earth
following equipment failure on Apollo 13.
As you can probably imagine, this ability to simulate and tweak without having to disrupt
the real-world environment has made digital twin technology enormously popular in
manufacturing settings. In Industry 4.0, digital twins are part of a perfect storm of
technology, encompassing the Internet of Things, robotics, AI, and automation. Yet, the
appeal of digital twins is set to expand far beyond the manufacturing sector. In fact,
research by analysts MarketsAndMarkets indicates that the digital twin market is expected
to grow from $3.8 billion in 2019 to $35.8 billion by 2025, with some of the largest
adopters being healthcare and defense.
With that in mind, let’s look beyond the manufacturing environment to discover how
organizations are successfully deploying digital twin technology in new and surprising
ways.

4. © 2020 Bernard Marr, Bernard Marr & Co. All rights reserved
1. The energy sector
GE has used digital twin technology to create what it calls a Digital Wind Farm, a cloud-
based model of a wind farm. As GE’s general manager for wind products, Keith Longtin,
puts it, “Every wind farm has a unique profile, like DNA or a fingerprint. We thought if we
could capture data from the machines about how they interact with the landscape and the
wind, we could build a digital twin for each wind farm inside a computer, use it to design
the most efficient turbine for each pad on the farm, and then keep optimizing the whole
thing.” What this means in practice is, thanks to digital twin technology, engineers can mix
and match different turbine configurations according to the conditions on the wind farm.
Then, once the wind turbine is installed, the digital twin model can collect and analyze
data from the real-life version and suggest ways to make it even more efficient.

5. © 2020 Bernard Marr, Bernard Marr & Co. All rights reserved
2. Hospitality
Digital twin technology can be used to simulate real-life events and situations, and this
could play a major role in the hospitality industry in future. As an example, CKE
Restaurants Holdings has been using digital twin technology to increase productivity in its
Carl’s Jr and Hardee’s restaurants. Restaurant floors and kitchens were digitized, allowing
the company to test different configurations that would help to reduce employee traffic
and improve the environment for customers.

6. © 2020 Bernard Marr, Bernard Marr & Co. All rights reserved
3. City management
If you can have a digital twin of a wind farm or restaurant, why not an entire city? Digital
twin technology helps city planners understand and improve factors like energy
consumption. There’s already a digital twin of Singapore, and we can expect other cities to
follow suit in future.

7. © 2020 Bernard Marr, Bernard Marr & Co. All rights reserved
4. Retail environments
The digital twin is still a relatively new concept in retail, but it could prove very valuable,
particularly when it comes to modeling customer behavior in stores. Analytics company
Pygmalios is highlighting digital twin technology as part of what it calls Retail 4.0 – an
approach that gathers granular, real-time data from physical retail environments and uses
that data to improve awareness of customer activity and behavior.

8. © 2020 Bernard Marr, Bernard Marr & Co. All rights reserved
5. Healthcare
Just as you can create a digital representation of any physical item or environment, it
should also be possible to create a “digital patient” – a digital model of a human body that
represents various measurements of the body, providing a personalized model of a
patient over their lifetime. That’s the ultimate vision of health technology company Philips.
The idea of a complete digital patient is still some way off, but digital twin technology is
already being applied to one particular part of the body and showing great promise.
Philips has created a clinical application called HeartModel, which creates a personalized
3D view of a patient’s heart based on 2D ultrasound images. As Philips sees it, one day a
virtual heart could save your real one.

9. Bernard Marr is an internationally best-selling author, popular keynote speaker, futurist, and a
strategic business & technology advisor to governments and companies. He helps
organisations improve their business performance, use data more intelligently, and
understand the implications of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data,
blockchains, and the Internet of Things.
LinkedIn has ranked Bernard as one of the world’s top 5 business influencers. He is a frequent
contributor to the World Economic Forum and writes a regular column for Forbes. Every day
Bernard actively engages his 1.5 million social media followers and shares content that
reaches millions of readers.
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© 2020 Bernard Marr , Bernard Marr & Co. All rights reserved© 2017 Bernard Marr , Bernard Marr & Co. All rights reserved
© 2020 Bernard Marr, Bernard Marr & Co. All rights reserved
Bernard Marr is an internationally best-selling author, popular keynote speaker, futurist, and a
strategic business & technology advisor to governments and companies. He helps
organisations improve their business performance, use data more intelligently, and
understand the implications of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data,
blockchains, and the Internet of Things.
LinkedIn has ranked Bernard as one of the world’s top 5 business influencers. He is a frequent
contributor to the World Economic Forum and writes a regular column for Forbes. Every day
Bernard actively engages his 1.5 million social media followers and shares content that
reaches millions of readers.
Visit The
Website

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