NATA’s Brett Hyland was an expert participant at a recent event exploring the fascinating world of ‘digital twin’ technology. This is a fast-moving area, full of surprising developments.
Digital twins are models of physical reality that can be used as a proxy for their physical counterpart. Digital twins are often linked to real data sources from the environment, which means that it updates in real time to reflect the original version. Digital twins are used in various industries to monitor complex infrastructure or manufacturing lines and even to predict maintenance needs, but there are implications for laboratory operations as well.
There is likely to be a range of laboratory applications for digital twins emerging in the relatively near future, especially in modelling testing equipment. According to Hyland, “in the global calibration sector, there has already been quite a large uptake of digital twins in modelling equipment items in order to do uncertainty estimates”. Other laboratory applications could include support for staff training in a digital environment, enabling remote equipment operation or maintenance, as well as delivery of test data streams that intrinsically link machine outputs to the input data set and the equipment item that produced the output.
The importance of standards
The event, hosted by AirLabOne, featured speakers with expertise from various technological perspectives including sensors, software support, laboratory hardware and regulatory policy. Hyland spoke from his role as UN/CEFACT Project Lead in supply chain product conformity, including the role of digital twins in product supply chains, and positively about prospects for interoperable technical standards granting visibility of an entire upstream supply chain – something previously thought to be largely unattainable for most industries.
From a testing and accreditation perspective, he talked about the interesting challenge of reliably linking data from different parties to the same digital twin, which requires agreed technical data standards. Hyland noted that, in a supply chain scenario involving a physical product and its digital twin, “you want that information that’s coming in to the digital twin to be reliable. And if it’s coming from a long supply chain, possibly a cross-border supply chain, you firstly need assurance as to where it came from and what’s happened to it along the way – that’s where event tracking standards are so important”.
The area of digital twin technology promises to be an interesting area to keep an eye on. Audience questions at the conclusion of the event made clear that there is interest in exploring the potential of this type of technology from a laboratory perspective. In turn, accreditation processes will also likely need to grapple with some of the implications that may arise from these developments.