IBM Digital Twin Exchange

2021: IBM uses digital twins to optimize AI

In mid-August 2021, it became known that with the advent of digital doubles, IBM will repurpose this business to bring intelligence, flexibility and efficiency to a wide range of industries. As part of the IBM Digital Twin Exchange project, an application store is being created to digitize the physical world, which will bring together enterprises and various service and tool providers.

The publication VentureBerat talked to the head of IBM Emerging Solutions, Lisa Sikat DeLuka, who leads IBM research in the field of digital doubles. Her team develops tools that change the working methods of engineers and technicians, combining digital twins, AI and technology IoT and allowing organizations to share experiences in common areas. Lisa Sikat DeLuca said that we define digital doubles in a broad sense, as a digital representation of any physical object.

You can imagine certain uses, for example, production equipment or a generator, but in fact a digital double can be anything if it has a digital analogue, which opens the door to many possibilities of what we can do with them. Digital doubles are not intended to replace other data management tools. In fact, they should work in tandem with tools such as APIs for data transfer and data warehouses, since it is they that allow connecting digital data with its physical counterpart, "she said.

IBM uses digital doubles to optimize AI

According to her, an electronic book is a digital representation of a physical book, which makes it a digital double. Now imagine that you flip the pages of your real book, and the e-book changes the pages or vice versa, when you change the page in the e-book, the page of the physical book changes. Such a double-sided bond between the double and its physical counterpart is a mature digital double and is a vivid example of how this technology can be applied in practice.

AI is, ultimately, data analysis and conclusions. The digital twin provides a more efficient way to monitor and exchange this data, which is used in AI models. Lisa Sikat DeLuke boldly states that without digital doubles there can be no AI, because they can bring users closer to their assets and allow them to get more accurate and useful conclusions.

IBM Digital Twin Exchange is a platform that connects organizations that want to purchase digital doubles with IBM partner ecosystem members who can sell them fault codes, maintenance plans, 3D models and other various data related to physical assets. For IBM, this is the first step to working with digital doubles, and then customers can use their AI and IoT solutions to fully take advantage of the value of digital doubles. For example, digital doubles can be combined with IBM Maximo's enterprise asset management system and based on available data, predict results.

In any industry where optimizing the performance of physical assets is a business imperative, there is a need for improvement and the ability to use data and digital twins. This is especially true for industries such as manufacturing, travel and transportation, energy and utilities, where system downtime or failures directly affect the overall outcome. As technologies such as AI and open hybrid cloud help organizations in these industries modernize their operations to make them more reliable, efficient and profitable, "said IBM Lisa Sikat DeLuca.[1]

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