Digital Twin Consortium

In my role at Microsoft, I represent the company on several standards organizations and consortia, including the Digital Twin Consortium (DTC). Microsoft was one of the founders of the DTC two years ago with the intent to reduce confusion in the marketplace about the definition of digital twins, to accelerate the market, and address interoperability needs. The resulting ecosystem is capturing best practices, defining case studies, and driving the innovation of digital twin technology.... Read more →

Digital Twin Consortium video describes the digital twin system interoperability approach.... Read more →

The digital twin concept encompasses use cases for both product lifecycle management (PLM) and for real-time streaming analytics in live systems. The latter is becoming ever more important as our society increasingly relies on a fast-growing population of IoT devices. With billions of smart devices constantly generating data, the task of tracking their telemetry and extracting real-time intelligence has become extremely challenging. Applying the digital twin concept to real-time analytics for IoT promises to address this challenge by revealing real-time insights, enabling immediate responses to emerging issues, and maximizing overall situational awareness... Read more →

Digital Twin Consortium created the Digital Twin System Interoperability Framework to unlock significant value in complex distributed computing systems such as digital twins. We invite you to review, challenge, refine, and adopt this framework, and we hope it proves helpful in designing computing systems that improve our lives.... Read more →

A holistic view of products, processes, or even the whole value chain to enable closed-loop engineering, cross-company digital services, and more is a crucial success factor for any data-driven organization. The next generation of digital twin technologies will play a key role in standardizing and automating business processes across current boundaries of systems and companies. This blog post introduces the general concept behind digital twins and the latest standards in this area.... Read more →

Digital Twin Consortium member Sean Olcott discusses the value of a digital twin glossary and the importance of digital twin terminology.... Read more →

Holistic understanding is one of the major benefits brought by digital twins, as stated in the Digital Twin Consortium's definition. What precisely are the types of holistic understanding brought by digital twins, and what added value can be expected by industry? Ultimately, what is the recommended implementation of digital twins to support holistic value creation? To start, let us consider the different levels of understanding brought by digital twins.... Read more →

For over 30 years, digital systems have dominated how the Building Automation System (BAS) industry has evolved to control and automate HVAC, security, lighting, vertical transport, and the plethora of other systems found in commercial buildings globally. The vision of practitioners has been consistent and focuses on how to use technology to increase the value of facilities by managing energy costs, improving occupant comfort and safety, adopting sustainable practices, and making facilities more productive for their owners and operators. This article will explore how digital twins can help realize the above vision. From the benefits of including typically non-operation technologies such as Building Information Modeling (BIM), utilizing integration frameworks that can maximize the value of data, focusing on the entire lifecycle of buildings, and enabling building owners and operators to view their facilities as strategic assets, adopting digital twin frameworks has a tremendous promise to make buildings truly smart.... Read more →

The Digital Twin Consortium released a definition in December of 2020 in a blog post focused on the foundational elements that constitute a digital twin. This post expands on the following statement in the definition: Digital twin systems transform business by accelerating holistic understanding, optimal decision-making, and effective action.... Read more →

You are a building or infrastructure owner. You have made the decision. You have decided that a Digital Twin would be beneficial in your business. How do you now implement successfully? How do you balance the undoubted benefits against the cost of implementation? To start, lets consider the definition of a Digital Twin that has been adopted by Digital Twin Consortium... Read more →