The lights out factory, industrial automation, the Industrial internet of things, and digital twin technology highlight the effort mankind has made to reduce to simplify facility monitoring and management challenges. These efforts have led to industry 4.0 and today, there’s no better time than now to explore the reach of emerging technology in delivering employee safety and optimizing business operations.
In the coming months, millions of industrial operations are expected to resume but at minimal capacity to ensure some semblance of social distancing is adhered to. In this situation, project managers, facility managers, and engineers will still be expected to oversee operations and ensure facilities run at the optimal capacity they’re capable of to meet available demand. They’re also expected to do this with minimal contact and alongside the challenges of a reduced workforce.
Managers and engineers cannot be everywhere at once which is one of the major reasons why remote facility monitoring and management is expected to define the future. At the top of the remote monitoring pile is the digital twin. The digital twin is an exact replica of assets, facilities, and processes in the physical world. With a digital twin platform, accurate digital representations of any facility, the assets within it, and its operational process can be modeled.
The model integrates operational data from assets within the facility to provide accurate representation of operational processes. This digital mirror of physical activities provides numerous use cases for enhancing business operations. These use cases include receiving business insight, predictive analytics, advanced planning, predictive maintenance and much more. If you take a minute to think about the diverse ways accurate digital representations of physical facilities could be useful, it becomes easy to see the unmatched potential of the digital twin. But here, the focus will be placed on its ability to deliver remote monitoring to facility managers and engineers.
Applying the Digital Twin as a Remote Monitoring Tool
Remote facility monitoring refers to the process of observing facility operations without having to physically be present at specific locations within the facility. Remote monitoring generally involves viewing operations through a screen or dashboard showcasing a digital model. For digital twin technology, your personal computer is the dashboard or viewing hardware while a digital twin software provides the interface for modeling the facility, its operations, and data produced.
Once the digital twin of any facility has been created, remote monitoring and management can commence. The digital twin can be used to monitor the operations within any facility across all industries. Starting with manufacturing, project managers can apply the digital twin at a granular or an expansive level. An example is analyzing the expected output of a manufacturing facility functioning with a reduced labor force or material inventory. Within the digital model, the manager can reduce the number of functioning workstations or available materials and see the effect on production output in real-time.
At the granular level, monitoring manufacturing facilities with digital twin technology can highlight how little changes affect production timelines. An example is increasing the recreational time for operators by a few minutes. This parameter can be integrated into the digital twin and the effect on production schedules, whether positive or negative, can be determined in real-time by simply running the model.
In healthcare, the digital twin provides remote monitoring opportunities for stakeholders to observe the impact of increased patient admission rate on a center’s available resources. Stakeholders can observe how quickly valuable resources are being used up, as well as, the effect of purchasing additional resources for care givers. The Simio infectious diseases and resource planning model provides a case study for the application of a digital twin in healthcare.
The model allows management observe the effect of a pandemic on their available resources and also provides insight into how an increase in resources such as protective personal equipment and bed space will help the hospital care for more people. The ability to make these decisions remotely ensures no one has to go about counting bed spaces and PPE inventory during a pandemic.
In other industries such as the hospitality industry and aviation, the digital twin expands its role as a remote monitoring tool to include capacity planning and iterative implementation. The digital twin can be used to assess how additional checkpoints can ease customer traffic at checkout points which is useful for airports. In the hospitality industry, it can be used to plan restaurant layouts and drive-through to ensure employees work efficiently and customer wait times are reduced.
Remote Monitoring with Simio Digital Twin Software
The Simio software provides an intuitive user-interface with extensive modeling features and tools for developing digital twin models. This supports the use of 3D models and reporting tools such as graphs and tables to ensure developed digital twins are highlight interactive and can be easily understood by both technical and non-technical individuals.
Simio also comes with a standard library of fixed objects which simplifies the modeling process and ensures you get started with ease. When handling complex analysis, users can take advantage of OptQuest to get the best results before implementing them.
Learn More
If you are interested in seeing a digital twin in action and learning more about how it can optimize your business operations, you can request a demo today.