A Digital Twin is a virtual environment that represents a physical object, system, or process. They are intended to improve operational efficiency, optimise processes and provide data driven insights for decision making, Digital Twins have the potential to revolutionise the way organisations develop and optimise their products, services and processes.  

Digital Twins couple a real-world and a virtual instance, and extend traditional modelling approaches to include real-time bi-directional information flow, and offer modelling of specific instances rather than generic abstractions.  

Adding Real Value is Challenging 

Digital Twins offer great potential to add value to business – such as by cost reductions, reduced time to market, improved security of operations, increased platform availability, increased safety mitigations, or even virtual commissioning. However, the majority of projects struggle and eventually fail to provide ROI. Synoptix believes that this is due to 3 key reasons: 

• Incorrect Problem Definition. The drive to adopt Digital Twins as the ‘modern’ way of operating has resulted in insufficient understanding of ‘the problem’ and the mechanism by which digital twins can assist. This leads to delays and wasted investment. 

• Security Vulnerabilities. The implementation of a Digital Twin can introduce new ‘attack surfaces’ due to their highly integrated nature. This can lead to vulnerabilities if security is not considered as part of the architecture. 

• Challenges in Management of Complex Data Systems. The underpinning engine of a Digital Twin works on data. Many implementations both struggle with  

  
  

Synoptix can support with pragmatic solutions 

Synoptix has a range of experience supporting our customers with the implementation of Digital Twin solutions. We can help by: 

• Defining the Problem and Identifying Value Creators. Our systems engineering expertise allows us to support you with identifying the problem you’re trying to solve, characterising the solution space (which may not include digital twins!) and selecting preferred options. A key part of this process is identifying the outcomes that would drive value within your business, so that the investment of building a Digital Twin will realise the value that you expect.  

• Architectural Definition and Secure By Design. We’ve got extensive experience in defining fit-for-purpose, resilient, and secure architectures for complex human-cyber-physical systems. This allows us to support you to deliver a Secure By Design system, as well as identify best-in-class technologies that we can integrate into the system design solution.  

• Process Mining and Domain Specific Modelling Languages (DSMLs). We are leading and commissioning a number of research programmes into these cutting-edge areas, which means we’re well positioned to exploit these opportunities to drive change in your systems. Process Mining is a key technique to allow you to exploit insights from vast quantities of operational data, and DSMLs allow you to bring your data to your stakeholders in forms that they can understand and relate to – helping explain complex concepts in understandable ways.