The #digitaltwin prototype is created before the physical twin and the digital twin model is used to define a type of entity or process.
What is a Prototype?
The digital twin prototype is typically comprised of engineering designs, processes, relevant analysis, and a visual representation to create the physical product or process. As you might imagine, it’s faster and cheaper to create and test a digital product than a physical one. Digital mistakes and iterations are definitely less costly or painful.
Models let you Define Once and Reuse Many
The digital twin model allows you define all aspects of a type of entity just once, rather than defining it repeatedly for each individual entity in your IoT platform. The model includes baseline information including a name, description, a variety of properties, one or more pictures or CAD models, and a version number because the model may evolve over its lifetime. If you’re on object oriented software developer, you can think of this as a base class comprised of one or more properties. Unique, individual entities are referred to as digital twin instances which I’ll cover in a later article. Each instance of a digital twin derived from a digital twin model will inherit its properties. You can best think of a digital twin model as a data definition, structured in a database or file. A composable digital twin model is created using a visual designer in an application or through a domain-specific programming language designed to create the proper data model. An example of a digital twin model might be a 2022 Ford F-150 with a specific set of features as properties. Thousands of actual 2022 Ford F-150s on the road that inherit the specific feature set from the model would be the digital twin instances.
More to Come
Follow along with me as I take you on a deep dive of all the elements that come together to make a digital twin. Click links below to catch up with other articles in the series: