ABSTRACT
The fourth phase of the Industrial Revolution - Industry 4.0 - has ameliorated how companies “think and act” today. The focus has now shifted towards fostering faster and smarter processes, leading to sustainable productivity. The three driving forces for Industry 4.0, according to Henrik von Scheel (Father of Industry 4.0), are value, people and clear targets. Several notable trends and technologies are emerging in the market today, which is transforming the working style of Industry and Companies. Digital Twin is one such innovation that can be termed as the “avant-garde” in the field of technology. With the advancement in IoT, Digital Twinning has gathered attention. It enables the creation of a model that can mimic a real-world object or simulate a process. This establishes a connection and understanding between the real physical world and the abstract digital domain. This has led to the opening of numerous opportunities to test various scenarios and has proven to reduce the latency involved in detecting defects and, consequently, the action time to address the same.
The three prerequisites for twinning include high-quality sensors, precise communication channels and a framework that can process the data acquired through sensors. This chapter reveals the nuances of the Digital Twins initiative, introduces the requirements for deploying twins, and discusses some real-world use cases. An attempt to highlight the application areas and current challenges faced in this area, with a discussion of future research perspectives, has also been made in the last sections of this chapter.
