According to research, there is a one in 135 chance that a single pair of doppelgangers exists. This means that on a planet with over 7.5 billion people, there may be people who look exactly like each of us. Despite the statistical odds, the real chances of us meeting our doppelgänger are very low. But what if we could create one online?  

Many tech evangelists point out that soon there will be digital worlds, or Metaverses, where we may be able to create our digital twins that live entirely separate lives. Digital twins as a concept are fundamentally a replica of something from the tangible world but with a unique mission. They would exist to improve their physical world counterpart.  

Digital twins paired with advancements in AI, are becoming increasingly valuable. They identify faults, can troubleshoot and eventually improve customer satisfaction levels. By gaining granular insights into the workings of a machine, this data is now a vital component in helping companies save time and money.   

AI and digital twins  

Initially, NASA was among the first to explore this concept. These mirrored systems proved critical when the Apollo 13 disaster struck, allowing the scientists back at NASA to quickly assess how they could salvage the mission.

Earlier, The European Twin Agency (ESA) leapt forward to leverage AI's potential for addressing the climate change issue. It is working on a digital twin of the Earth to understand the planet's past, present, and future, and forecast extreme, climate change events.

AI and ML algorithms enable the business to build digital twins and to process a large amount of data collected from them. By leveraging AI capabilities with digital twins, engineers can accelerate the design processes by quickly evaluating many possible design alternatives. In addition, efficient data mining combined with domain expertise allows AI to power digital twins from anywhere.   

On the other hand, digital twins can help businesses generate simulated data that can be used to train AI models. Artificial intelligence can also benefit from digital twins for creating an environment for machine learning test scenarios. Then, depending on the utility score of the virtual environment, data scientists and engineers can deploy AI solutions.  

Benefits of digital twins  

According to the IoT implementation survey by Gartner, organizations implementing IoT already use digital twins or plan to use it within a year.   

A Bangalore-based IoT startup SwitchOn uses efficient edge computing systems to continuously analyze high-frequency data streams of vibration, temperature and energy consumption in manufacturing plants. This is done by providing digital twins of heavy assets, whose insights industries can use to monitor plant activity and predict availability.

Here are some of the benefits of using a digital twin.  

• Low maintenance cost via predictive maintenance  
• Improved productivity  
• Faster production times  
• Testing before manufacturing  
• Improved customer satisfaction  
• Improved business outcomes  

 The digital twin enables a business to simulate, diagnose, predict and design for different industries and applications with data aggregation. Combining AI with innovations like digital twins will generate effective and efficient use cases across sectors.