An essential part of the Digital Twin Consortium Global Ecosystem
By David Lee, Digital Twin Consortium Project Manager
The DTC is a membership-driven organization, and the DTC Regional Branch Organizer (RBO) program illustrates this perfectly; each RBO is a member that has volunteered to help the DTC accelerate the development, adoption, and monetization of digital twins in their region. These members leverage their strong regional presence, in particular their relationships with academia, government, and industry start-ups, to help create both an expanding community of interest and opportunities spanning a diverse mix of market segments and applications for our members.
So why does the DTC have an RBO program? First, business customs are not consistent across the globe, and the RBOs use their local knowledge and experience to help the DTC and its members navigate the prevailing customs in their region. Second, RBOs expand the reach and opportunity for DTC members to participate in projects and pilot programs across the globe. Currently, the RBO network covers every major global time zone and is represented in North America, South America, Europe, India, Southeast Asia, Japan, and Australasia.
RBOs are empowered to facilitate regional engagements and activities for the DTC and drive awareness and adoption of digital twins by conducting DTC events and joint promotional activities. In practice, this means that we see a wide range of activities by the RBO community, some of which are highlighted below.
The Northeast USA RBO initiated a series of meetings to discuss how Digital Twins can help deliver a Distributed Service Operation to the State of Maine and recruited interested parties in industry and academia to collaborate on the project. The result was the development of a public request for proposal (RFP) and Minimum Viable Product specification. Going forward, discussions are now being held to develop a similar proposal for the Pacific Northwest, California, and contribute to the master plan for how New York City will evolve the entire transportation and logistics process going forward. The latter could include a digital twin solution for the secure supply chain, EV charging, hydrogen production and use, edge computing, and more, and the exposure the proposal process generates could mean more cities declaring an interest.
The Australia and New Zealand RBO has committed to holding public meetings twice a year, and in 2023 organized well-attended public seminars entitled, “Operationalizing AI in Digital Twins for Natural Resources” and “Intelligent Digital Twins in Natural Resources” in Brisbane and Perth respectively. These seminars featured several speakers and panelists from the DTC and the wider community. News about the 2024 seminars will be available soon.
The India RBO was launched with a one-day seminar at the Open and Fair Data conference in New Delhi in September. Several DTC members from US and Europe attended, and because of the seminar the RBO began relationships with the Indian Ministry of Mobility & Infrastructure and the Delhi International Institute of Technology. The India RBO coordinated with the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing to host its next roundtable, as well as a panel comprising several DTC members both in person and online, at the CDAC’s Accelerating Biology: The Exascale Leap conference in Pune, India on February 6-8, 2024 with a follow-on roundtable with over 50 attendees in-person and online generously hosted by the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA).
The Italy RBO is not only promoting DTC to the Italian Association of Automatic Packaging Machine Association and arranging for the DTC CTO to present the Consortium to the main Italian packaging machine producers, but also represents the DTC as stakeholder in the activities of EU-US TTC, Trade and Technology Council, a high-level working group established by the Presidents of the US and the European Commission. In the latter capacity, the RBO has brought the DTC Fintech Working Group into the EU Green Bonds initiative and will be working with them going forward to offer a digital twin solution in this space.
In Germany, the RBO has strong ties to local industry and is collaborating with many industrial companies on test beds as varied as Digital Auto, Industrial Service and even the Digital Twin of an Irish pub. The RBO also has close ties to the IDTA, a DTC liaison partner, with whom it is developing templates for Digital Twins industry. In 2024, the Germany RBO will be hosting or supporting a number of events such as a seminar on Ethics and AI in April and a Night of Science at their campus in June and culminating in their hosting the DTC’s Q3 Member Meeting in Heilbronn, Germany.
In the Far East, the Korea RBO held a public conference to launch the Korea Digital Twin Working Group, attracting 98 attendees, and has already attracted new members to the DTC. In addition, the Korea RBO hosted the Australia RBO for a Digital Twin training session to more than 30 participants, and the aim is to leverage this into a Digital Transformation training program for Korea in 2024. Meanwhile, the Japan RBO launched in the latter part of the year and is already in discussions about a potential collaboration with Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry and New Energy Development Organization (NEDO).
The Saudi Arabia RBO will be introduced during the LEAP event, the world’s most-attended technology event, at the Riyadh Exhibition and Convention Center in Malham, Saudi Arabia 4 – 7 March 2024.
These are just some of the achievements and planned activities for the RBOs, and even so you can see that the RBO network is meeting its objectives and evangelizing Digital Twins – and in particular the Digital Twin Consortium story – across the globe and in many vertical markets. There are still more parts of the world where we need to reach, and so the network will continue to grow. Look out for announcements of new RBOs in the coming months, and in addition we will be informing you of RBO events and initiatives in your part of the world.
This is the first of two blogs on the DTC’s global ecosystem.