Ruminating on Digital Twin

A 'Digital Twin' is a digital replica of any asset, process or system.

Digital Twin of an Asset

Let's take for example a digital replica of a fixed asset like a CNC machine or a moving asset like a truck. Using the power of IoT, we could create a digital twin of the asset on the cloud that would have the same 'state' as the asset on the field
Once you have the digital twin of an asset on the cloud, you can realize business value from it in the following broad areas:

• Remote Monitoring and Diagnostics - using sensor data
• Predictive Maintenance - using ML 
• Enhancing Product Quality - using closed loop engineering and integrating your PLM data and Field Service data with IoT data
• Transforming Consumer Experience - understand how consumers are using your products and build new differentiated digital capabilities such as hyper-personalization, etc. 

Digital Twin of a Process/System

A digital twin of a complete process would enable us to identify process bottlenecks and take necessary steps to streamline processes and improve the productivity. Such a capability is of immense business value in the process industry. 

Digital Twin of a Person (Relationship Graph)

This is something which all social media companies already have - e.g. FB, LinkedIn, Google, etc. Besides storing all personal attributes, a digital twin of a person would also create a relationship graph that shows how the person is connected to other people and leverage this graph for business value. There are ethical concerns around how much data we are sharing with these large social media companies and the potential misuse of that data.