These Four Points Help You Understand the "Digital Twin"

The city is like a dream in which all images can be realized.

——《Le città invisibili by Italo Calvino》

The city is the hub of human activity, a vast, sophisticated system that houses both human productivity and residential quarters. The interconnectedness of enormous volumes of data makes spatial governance a challenging issue.

How can a publicly accessible operating system handle the actual space of steel and cement? The Apollo program of NASA in the 1960s, when spacecraft were fashioned into "twin brothers" for pre-flight training and flight simulation on Earth, may have been an inspiration. These physical twin models generate flight data that accurately represents flying conditions and assists astronauts in making sound emergency decisions. The term "digital twin" was first introduced by NASA in 2010, immediately setting off a wave in the sphere of science and technology. Numerous IoT players jumped into the fray, and now digital twinning is a must to advance smart spaces.

Imagine making an exact replica of the entire city and pasting it into a dynamic, virtual environment. Science and technology have made this "mirage" dream scene a reality. When you ride the subway, enter an office building, or shop in a mall, the operators help you retain the data of these scenarios in the "virtual city" generated by the digital twins.

In a nutshell, the four elements comprise "digital twins"

The industry's early adoption of digital twin technology helped to shape the first aspect of its " full life cycle."  Friends who are familiar with industrial manufacturing should be aware of the term "Product Life-cycle Management" (PLM), which denotes the need for a significant amount of data to be gathered, processed, and utilized throughout the entire iterative process, from the beginning of customer demand for products to the product market life cycle management of design, listing, maintenance, and elimination. It implements task-based access to the twins projected in the virtual space in addition to receiving and safeguarding the information produced by physical space entities as a database. Items must be monitored, simulated, and optimized throughout their life cycle in order to achieve "sustainable development."

The second characteristic of the digital twin technology, which makes it easiest to distinguish it from "digital modeling," is its "real-time or quasi-real-time" replication capability, which serves as the foundation for gathering full-cycle data. Third, by continuously updating and providing feedback on the ontology's real-time state in the digital world, digital twins can evolve and adapt to the entity with no discernible lag.

Digital twin technology has evolved from early physical replication to the fundamental spatial bionic and data analysis functions. Through monitoring equipment operation, sensor updates, applications, and other data, digital twin technology analyzes and evaluates the status of future space operations. The fourth characteristic of the evolution of digital twin technology is the "two-way" operation, where the physical model inputs the operation data, and the twins output the future information.

Information is a replacement for squandered physical resources, according to Professor Michael Grieves, who committed himself to investigate the idea of digital twins in 2002. Humans have traditionally used physical resources like energy, materials, hardware, and other resources for manufacturing activities in the physical world. Still, today, "information" is a more important resource. The past and future states of the physical environment are analyzed and understood using information and data. It may be used repeatedly and is never wasted, which lowers the expense of material loss and trial and error.

Landing experiment of digital twins

Digital twins are used to creating a link between a physical city and a digital city, and a real-time mirror image is created on the digital platform by gathering enormous amounts of data about city operation, planning, and construction, using the urban area in China with the highest percentage of the resident population as an example. To achieve "panoramic monitoring of larger cities, smaller corners of subtle perception," describe and provide feedback on the extremely long life cycle of the city. Operators may locate and operate the many systems and pieces of equipment in the city remotely, acquire insight into the unseen operation law of the area by sitting in front of the large screen, and make judgments and analyses by following the course of events. The situation in which "the blind touch the elephant" occurs will impact how the city is governed, administered, and served.

The 14th Five-Year Plan of China and the general concept of the long-term objective of 2035 include the investigation of the digital twin smart city. From a technological idea, the digital twin is now becoming a catalyst for innovation and development in China. Wanrui Technology, a Onewo-affiliated provider of smart space technology services, is also using digital twins into the design of smart cities.

Independently created by Vanrui IntelliTech, the Wanyun stardust-Spatial Digital Twin PaaS platform is dedicated to resolving the issues of data integration and scene linkage in diverse heterogeneous systems. It offers a fundamental capability base for digital operations. To actualize the intelligent operating system "out of the box", connect to the SaaS application layer. Various IoT services, including visualization, audio and video, AI, and positioning, are offered by the mid-level Wanyun stardust-Spatial Digital Twin PaaS platform, which enables "on-demand call" in the PaaS platform layer. Power edge intelligent hardware is plug-and-play and located next to the IaaS device layer. The "cloud, edge, and end" trinity can realize the release of the basic labor force and the improvement of space efficiency by perceiving the information of equipment, facilities, assets, people, and activities and managing them in digital space in real-time. This can help Onewo migrate from a single on-site service to a series of remote operations.

The Wanyun stardust-Spatial Digital Twin PaaS platform has collaborated with Vanrui IntelliTech Smart Space solution. It has been widely used in future communities (Nanteng Sky City), intelligent communities (17 miles in Chongqing, Jinyu, Washington, etc.), smart parks (Xiamen Gaoqi Health Post Station), intelligent construction sites (more than 1000 Vanke construction projects), smart cities (Wuhan Huashan, Chengdu Liantou High-tech Zone give business system developers the tools they need to create digital twin applications that connect consumers in many scenarios quickly.

To establish Hengqin Guangdong-Macao Deep Cooperation Zone, the nation's first "property city," Onewo started working with the management committee of Hengqin New District in Zhuhai in 2018. The Wanyun stardust-Spatial Digital Twin PaaS platform, developed by Vanrui IntelliTech, is used to build a twin city base utilizing the Internet of Things, geographic data, cloud computing, edge computing, visual recognition, and other technologies. A visual map of the Hengqin Guangdong-Macao deep cooperation zone is displayed on a large screen.

Hengqin Guangdong Macao Cooperation Zone

National policies actively promote the development of smart cities directed by digital twin cities, and the bureau's cutting-edge status attracts numerous businesses. In the long run, management and operators must increase data governance and supervision while having a clear vision in light of enormous amounts of data and hundreds of associated parties. The cornerstone for producing digital twins should, however, be human experience in any given environment. . It is crucial to take "people-oriented, locally appropriate action". Applications for digital twins and their deployment strategies are developed in accordance with various environmental requirements to develop a high-value wisdom scene that addresses the client's problem.

The evolution of human civilization can be traced back to how human life has changed in space. We are bringing up our children in a universe that has been evolving for hundreds of millions of years while still providing them with cutting-edge science and technology.

Professor Grieves once said: "Bytes (data) should be used in places where actual physical products were previously consumed. " We expect the digital twin technology to bring us a new era of more autonomous and intelligent space technology in the future!