In this 20‑minute virtual presentation, Dr. Jonathan Reichental introduces digital twins—virtual replicas of physical assets—within the context of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Industry 4.0). He begins by framing the evolution of the three prior industrial revolutions and explains how the convergence of cyber‑physical technologies (AI, sensors, advanced materials, analytics) defines the current era. Reichental defines a digital twin, outlines its role across the product lifecycle (design, build, operation), and illustrates its utility with concrete examples: virtual car testing, factory‑floor equipment simulation, wind‑turbine monitoring, hospital process optimization, building management, and a city‑scale twin of Singapore. He highlights the enabling technologies (IoT sensors, real‑time data streams, cloud analytics) and stresses the critical need for cybersecurity to protect intellectual property. Looking forward, he notes rapid growth in manufacturing and emerging medical applications such as patient‑specific surgical twins. The talk concludes with a call to engage via social media, a plug for his book Smart Cities for Dummies (which discusses city‑scale twins), and an invitation for further discussion.
Chapters
Hi everyone. It's just great to be here. I'm Dr. Jonathan Reichental and I'm thrilled to be at the Internet of Manufacturing event here, virtually online. Whether you're watching this live or in a recording, it's good to have you be part of this and I hope that I can add value today to in the content I share with you. Again, I'm Dr. Jonathan Reichental, I am an educator, teach at many universities, I create content, I consult, and I'm also an investor in social impact companies. So today I'm going to just give a short presentation on digital twins and in this presentation I'm going to cover the basics. If you're not familiar with this topic, this is probably the right session for you. I'm not going to go particularly deep, but I just want to give a high level overview of this topic and I hope you find it fascinating. I certainly do and many of my students do, and of course organizations are getting tremendous value from it. Now, I don't think that a presentation or a workshop should stop when the, when the video is over or the presentation is over. So I encourage you to connect with me on Twitter and continue the conversation. Perhaps you have some follow up questions for me or you just want to follow the topics that I share very frequently, which range not only about digital twins, but about the fourth industrial revolution, quantum computing, and as you'll see a little later, the future of cities, which is quite a big deal. So there's my Twitter handle for you. So let's start with a little background. You always have to do that when providing the context for a new technology. The world is seen a series of revolutions. In fact, we have seen now three major industrial revolutions. And we're entering what appears to be a fourth Industrial revolution. And I just want to quickly describe each of those in this image here. You can see, of course, that to make it relevant, we use the term industry instead of industrial revolution, but we're kind of talking about the same thing. It really is the adoption of industrial mechanisms and new innovation that has propelled and moved humanity forward over the last few hundred years. So back in the 1700s, you get this first industrial revolution and sort of steam is the big deal, and using then steel to build bridges and railways. About 100 years later in the 1800s, you get the second industrial revolution and in this you have things like electricity. Electricity is a really big deal and that allows for mass production. The manufacturing that we all know about today, telecommunications, air flight, a really transformational innovation that has moved a large part of the planet into an absolutely completely new day. The third industrial revolution, and I would argue we're still living in it starts in about the 1950s. And this is really about computers and electronics, ultimately the Internet. The third industrial revolution enables all of this, this scenario that we're in right now where you are watching me live or listening to recorded video from your smartphone or your laptop or some other, other device. Now we are entering the potential here in the first few decades of the 21st century, what appears to be maybe a fourth industrial revolution. And this revolution is characterized by the intersection of the cyber, physical world, you know, bits and atoms. And we have a series of new technologies like artificial intelligence and sensors and even better materials that's enabling us to build things in completely new ways, to innovate at scale and very rapidly. And we're making breakthroughs. And not only that, we have huge impact with these changes, massive scope. And then fundamentally, one of the core definitions of the fourth industrial revolution is the convergence of many, many technologies. And it's really those technologies represent both the physical world and the digital world. And it's this context, it's this background that leads us to this notion of the digital twin. So as I lean back a little bit here so you can see what is a digital twin? So digital twin is. Well, it's, first of all, it's a virtual replica of a physical thing. So the technologies of the fourth industrial revolution, digitalization, analytics, data, sensors, really super performing computer aided design, is allowing us to build virtual replicas of physical things. Okay, this doesn't sound such a breakthrough. Haven't we been doing that for a while? Well, let's take a look at this image here. Now we're in a factory. This, this looks like some sort of power plant or, you know, some, some huge machines here for moving perhaps fluids. That would be maybe one of my guesses, perhaps water. And what we're thinking about is adding an additional one of these devices to this industrial setting. And, well, here we can see by simulating a virtual replica or a digital twin of this new device, we can see a lot of new detail about how it might look in this new environment. Well, not just how it looks, of course, how it may be, how it's going to function, and, you know, different areas for our consideration that there is just a digital twin before we've ever built a single physical thing. Now, I've been talking about this sort of design phase, you know, creating a digital twin first. But the digital twin technology will show up in at least three areas of, let's use the broad term product lifecycle management or PLM product life cycle management. And you've got digital twin showing up in the design phase and then in the build phase and finally when we're operating it. So what might this look like? I mean, this slide alone tells you that the digital twin has remarkable utility in various phases of either manufacturing process or in building new software systems and other entities. So let's take a look at this image here. Here you have a. A car. Clearly this car has not been built yet. And so we go ahead and we render this digital twin, this digital replica, this virtual replica. And yeah, again, we've been doing that for a long time, but now we're going to do a few more things. We're actually going to put this through a wide variety of scenarios. We're going to drive this car in snow and in heat, we're going to flood it with storm conditions and we're going to see what happens. And as we do that, we're going to get really good scenario data or simulation data, and that's going to help inform us about the design. Should we tweak something in terms of its physical design, but also should we use a different material? How did this new paint coating chemistry work on this particular vehicle, for example? So we get to do a lot of work before we've ever built anything with this digital rendering of the car. That's really helpful because we haven't spent too much money. And sure, cars are built this way today, now, but we can build a whole lot of things this way. We can create digital twins for just about anything. And we'll see some examples here in just a moment. Again, whilst we can create specific devices and units like a car, digital twins are showing up on the manufacturing floor. As we think about, you know, adding new manufacturing machinery here, again you can see what it might look like. And again, we can simulate it, which is cool. We can actually show it working in this environment and analyze the data that that creates and tweak so that again, we get a more refined and optimized solution before we ever build it. Now, when we go ahead and build, we can have sensors. Let me go back to that image just for one moment. We can use sensors in the manufactured environment to ensure that we are getting the results we are desiring, that we can detect things like manufacturing issues and errors as we're developing a new product. And the way in which this is achieved is through the use of sensors. So what we want to be able to do, and this again is Another emerging technology in this fourth industrial revolution is put these low core sensors strategically over a physical object, the physical item, and have those sensors pick up a whole variety of data inputs and then provide them to the digital twin so that we can detect those things. I just mentioned to you now a neat little example here is the use of digital twins in wind turbines. And so these are kind of hard to maintain and also, you know, get up close to once they're in action. And so what we can do is, and we're seeing this is we can put a whole lot of sensors, what we're calling as, you know, the Internet of things, put the industrial Internet of things sensors on these, you know, they're small, very variable sensors for capturing a whole variety of different inputs, everything from things like heat and vibration and others. And then that in this case potentially would use some sort of wireless technology to send that data back to receiving end. And then we can have the digital twin, in this case, in this imagery, the digital twin tell us what's going on with wind turbine. Knowing what's happening means we can modify, we can actually even send code back to the wind turbine to optimize its performance. And now you start to see the real high quality applications of a digital twin, particularly in this use case. But digital twins are showing up in much more than just the factory floor or in the design of products. Here you see an example of hospital, and digital twins have found a role in process improvement. So you can of course use a digital twin to create a hospital, but if you want to retrofit an existing hospital, you can do that with sensors. And then from that we can render a digital twin of that hospital and look for all sorts of opportunities, like time to get a patient from an ambulance to an operating room. And all sorts of efficiencies can be sought. Looking at how a complicated environment like a hospital operates, Digital twins are showing up in our cities. Here, yes, is another example of a building. And in this particular example, we have the physical building that exists in the real world. And we've put again a number of IoT devices, Internet thing devices and sensors around this building to detect all sorts of things, all manner of characteristics of this building. Again, could be things like heat, could be detecting smoke or air quality, temperature obviously is a big one, humidity. And here in this console, for example, whoops. On this side here, you can see a variety of measurements that are consumed and projected, if you like, onto the digital twin over the cloud from the physical twin in real time. And that's providing intel for whoever is tasked with monitoring this building. Now, as a person who thinks deeply about and helps cities succeed, I wanted to show you the digital twin of Singapore. And Singapore, the city state has invested over $70 million in creating a high quality digital twin of their entire city. This is just one section here and it's now in use. And here of course, you have the physical city and you have the digital city. Now in the digital city, city leaders and whole variety of stakeholders can monitor various aspects of how this city is functioning. Everything from energy consumption to pollution, air quality, the effects of storms and weather, and even traffic congestion. And understanding how the perhaps public transport here is functioning whether it's on time or not. So this digital twin gives a broad range of stakeholders a remarkable view of the operations of this entire city. And we're doing the same thing with factories. Here's a tractor manufacturing facility. And it doesn't have to be, you know, we don't have to see the actual manufacturing lines, we simply need the data. And that can also be one way of seeing the physical twin is by looking at these digital dials. So digital twins don't necessarily have to look like the object you are monitoring. One big point here, give you a chance to see it here. That's great to play with this new technology, cybersecurity must be a priority, as it should be in all aspects of the, of our digital transformation here in the fourth industrial revolution. But particularly on digital twins, you don't want your competitors or bad nation states robbing or using your intellectual property. So I would say as you think through this, you must couple digital twins with intense focus on cyber security. So as we look out a little bit, what does the future look like for digital twins? Well, it's an exploding area. Certainly one of its biggest domains right now is the manufacturing space. And that's why it's so appropriate for attendees at the Internet of Manufacturing Congress here to be able to understand it better. General Electric is one provider, has hundreds of thousands of assets out in the field that now have digital twins. But we're going to see digital twin usage used for our own bodies where we, prior to an operation, surgery team may create a digital twin of us so that can practice or evaluate the procedure well before you. You're actually lying on the operating theater table. So that's it at a very high level. I realize it's quick, but hopefully you kind of picked up a few little nuggets there. Maybe you had some questions or didn't realize its applicability. Pretty broad applicability. And I hope that this was maybe inspirational for you so you can think more and research the topic in greater detail. I've recently written a book about the future of cities called Smart Cities for Dummies, part of the Dummy series, as you can see here. And you can Access it through smartcitybook.com or Amazon or your local any of your local bookstores, physical or online. And in it I speak about digital twins in a city context. That's one of the reasons I wanted to share this with you is digital twins are going to play a big role not just in manufacturing and in Industry 4.0, but also in a city context. So would welcome you to check out that book. Finally, I just wanted to say thank you very much for spending 20 minutes with me today. Again, I wanted to remind you that if you want to connect with me, ask me questions or discuss an issue, Delighted to do that. Always happy to educate or help you. And you can do that through simply through my Twitter handle here or LinkedIn, you can find me on LinkedIn, I'm very active or at my own website, which is reichental.com so I hope you have an amazing rest of this Congress and conference. And if you're watching on replay on a video, thank you for spending this 20 minutes with me. It's been a real honor and pleasure and I wish you good luck in the future. Thank you.
