BLUFFTON, SC — As part of BEMA’s annual convention, taking place June 20-24 in Bluffton, SC, the association partnered with Arizona State University to host three virtual workforce-related sessions as part of its Workforce Wednesday on June 21.
The first session, Digital Twin and Industrial Internet of Things (IoT): A Technical and Business Discussion, focused on IoT-related themes, including project development and workstreams. Raghu Santanam, senior associate dean and professor at ASU’s W.P. Carey School of Business, and Binil Starly, school director and professor at the university’s Ira Fulton Schools of Engineering, led the discussion.
Working from a definition of a digital twin as a virtual representation of real-world entities and processes that are synchronized at a specified frequency and fidelity, Santanam suggested how digital twinning implementation could work in a bakery setting.
“The key addition to that basic definition is that digital twinning is based on real-time data,” he said. “That’s very critical. You must think about how often you synchronize data collection from the Internet of Things and the fidelity of the data. How do you ensure the data you’re capturing is relevant in the context of whatever it is you’re trying to monitor?”
Santanam emphasized that in sectors such as manufacturing, the digital twin concept should have a data network effect.
“You’re not going to see a lot of business value coming from one-off implementations or by digitizing one particular area of your manufacturing floor,” he said. “Its value multiplies as you build up scale. Digital twinning implementation is not a one- or two-month project; it’s a journey. It can take several years in a sizable organization to get to that real business value generation.”
"Digital twinning implementation is not a one- or two-month project; it’s a journey. It can take several years in a sizable organization to get to that real business value generation.” — Raghu Santanam | senior associate dean and professor | W.P. Carey School of Business
For digital twinning to take seed and work, it must have support from the business side of the organization.
“You must ask, ‘Where does my organization need to be in five or ten years?’” Starly added. “Then you work your way backward to figure out what technology makes sense. It cannot be a pilot project where a section of a factory is digitized. That’s why an internal champion is so critical to digital twinning implementation.”
The session also identified IoT-enabled project workstreams such as business integration; data storage and advanced analytics; sensors, specific devices and device management; dashboards and reporting on system health; and IoT privacy and security.
These workstreams help create and sustain a digital factory — an interconnected network of intelligent models that represent a factory’s critical physical assets and its extended supply chain in both static and dynamic states.
A discussion about Industry 4.0 wouldn’t be complete without a nod to the future. The session ended with a look at the next decade of technologies for the digital factory. Machines redesigned with AI in mind, pervasive sensing, mass AI visualization, and dynamic illumination and reflections are just a few technologies in the digital factory pipeline.
