With the continuous breakthrough of underlying technologies and convergence of applications, industrial digital twin industry is expected to usher in accelerated development in the upcoming era of artificial intelligence.
“Digital twinning is an important starting point for AI in the manufacturing sector.” Zhang Hao, director general of the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Society, said in an interview with China Business News, “Because the manufacturing industry needs to balance and optimize the market time, quality, price and other indicators, there are many constraints and huge data, it is difficult to achieve data analysis without the addition of a model, and digital twin is a good model combination platform.”
Industrial digital twinning is the integration, integration and innovative application of multiple types of digital technologies. It builds accurate physical object models in digital space based on modeling tools, uses real-time IoT data to drive model operation, and then builds comprehensive decision-making capability through data and model integration and integration to promote closed-loop optimization of the whole business process.
Liu Yang, deputy director of the Industrial innovation research Department of Industrial Internet Technology at the China Information and Communication Academy, said that the application of industrial digital twin is only in its initial stage, and four types of key scenarios are expected to become key application directions. That is, “application popularization” of three-dimensional visualization transformation of existing factories, “ability improvement” of full-scene virtual manufacturing diagnosis, “single point breakthrough” of real-time simulation/intelligent simulation, and “Science and technology breakthrough” of major equipment system engineering.
According to the China Information and Communication Academy, the global digital twin market scale reached 4.9 billion US dollars in 2021, and it is expected that the global digital twin market will grow at a compound growth rate of 58% to reach 48.2 billion US dollars in 2026. In addition, according to iResearch, China’s digital twin market scale is 10.4 billion yuan in 2022, and it is expected that the domestic market scale will reach 37.5 billion yuan in 2025, with a CAGR of 54.3% from 2022 to 2025.
With continuous breakthroughs in underlying technologies, the future of industrial digital twin has arrived
Digital twin industry players are composed of digital twin related technology providers and solution integrators. Among them, the technology providers are mainly visualization manufacturers, BIM (building information model), GIS (geographic information system), CIM (urban information model), CAD/CAE simulation modeling and other technology manufacturers.
Digital twin modeling, visual rendering, simulation inference, perceptual identification, GIS and new surveying and mapping, interactive control are the six technologies supporting digital twin technology, among which modeling and simulation is the core and foundation of digital twin technology, building a high fidelity virtual model and carrying out real-time and high precision simulation is a huge system engineering.
In recent years, in order to meet the new demands of digital twinning technology for simulation capabilities and tools, mainstream industrial software suppliers have launched their own digital twinning solutions to realize multi-physical field, multi-discipline and multi-scale modeling and simulation. Currently, the leading digital twinning technology platforms are dominated by overseas manufacturers such as Ansys, Siemens and Dassault.
Domestic technology providers are also making breakthroughs in their respective segments. In terms of basic modeling software, domestic CAD software has begun to form an autonomous and controllable wave in recent years. Local enterprises such as Zhongwang Software have mastered a number of key core technologies in 2D CAD field. In the field of 3D CAD, from the accelerated breakthrough of underlying technology of geometric modeling to the software cloud technology innovation for the collaborative design requirements of large enterprises, Domestic manufacturers such as Huatian Software and Xindi Digital are accelerating the construction of future-oriented next-generation industrial software.
In terms of visual rendering technology, with the improvement of network and hardware performance, the rendering effect of domestic engine has been greatly improved, and the application of small scenes has gradually penetrated into large-scale scenes. For example, Nano Tech has developed a dedicated digital twin engine, ThingJS, and a one-stop digital twin platform, ThingStudio Forest, to meet the needs of digital twin visualization scenarios in different industries, and has implemented and expanded the functions of the upper tools supported by its own engine. Based on the ThingJS Digital Twin engine, Eutech has developed the ThingJS Digital Twin low-code platform, which increases development efficiency by over 90% compared to traditional game engines, improving the ease of use and usability of digital twin technology.
The breakthrough of the underlying technology of digital twinning and the rapid development of digital twinning instrumentalization and platform gradually turn the digital twinning technology system with high technical threshold into affordable software for everyone, providing the basic conditions for the large-scale application of digital twinning technology in the manufacturing industry.