Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

Written By: Rajive Bagrodia, Chief Technologist for Digital Twins – Keysight Technologies

The adage “Necessity is the mother of invention” could be used to describe how many new technologies were invented, but few so dramatically as digital twins.

During the space race, scientists were called on to develop vehicles and research tools that could withstand the frontiers of space. At NASA, scientists needed a way to observe how the space exploration tools they were designing would operate in their intended environments. They needed to ensure these items would work as anticipated because once they left Earth’s atmosphere, the opportunity for repairs and issue correction would leave with them.

Digital twins gave NASA scientists the ability to simulate these remote environments and observe how designs would work in an array of different scenarios. This, in turn, allowed them to correct for issues they would not have even considered without them.

It is easy to think of digital twins as simulation models if your primary exposure to the concept is from popular fiction. However, they are so much more.

The reason they are called digital twins is because the model can be a living object that can learn, gather information from the physical environment, update its state and—in some sense—stay synchronised with the state of the corresponding physical object.

The Significance of Digital Twins in Analysing Cyber Resilience

By using digital twins, you can subject networks to a wide variety of cyberattacks and security risk events to see how they will perform. You can then reconfigure networks to mitigate the impacts of potential attacks. For both NASA and network security, the importance of digital twins cannot be overstated. Subjecting physical networks or devices to these types of events is impractical. But without some way to test their resilience and identify red flag indicators of potential threat, the teams responsible for designing and maintaining these systems are working blind.

Digital Twins Fuel Digital Transformation

When my children were young, they were obsessed with building blocks. As is well-known, these blocks come in a few standard shapes and sizes of interlocking pieces that can be used to create complex structures. These can range from space crafts to dinosaurs and complete communities with buildings, open spaces and people. As a parent, I am grateful to the building block developers because they gave me hours of quiet time for my own projects.

“During the space race, scientists were called on to develop vehicles and research tools that could withstand the frontiers of space. At NASA, scientists needed a way to observe how the space exploration tools they were designing would operate in their intended environments.”

But my productive peace would be broken when my children’s ambitious plans for their building blocks structures would be derailed when one or the other child would bump the table or be unable to snap two smaller objects together or try to enhance an existing structure and fail. As they sat arguing and assigning blame for the failure, my kids would be dismantling their creation piece by piece until they found and fixed the ‘interoperability’ issue.

Design and interoperability complexities have much higher stakes in the real world. Today’s tech stacks are complex and their comprising individual components work together in delicate harmony. Adding, updating or changing any one piece can have a cascading effect on the entire system. Making changes to a physical network can be risky if you do not know how new components will impact the overall ecosystem.

With digital twins, you can experiment in a far more aggressive manner than with physical networks. Digital twins are well suited to strengthening cyber resilience and mitigating another potential vulnerability inherent in modern technology: complexity. By creating a framework in which digital twins of complex systems can be constructed by composing twins of components and sub-systems, we can add a lot more structure and agility to the process of creating these twins and using them to explore a wide range of ‘what-if’ scenarios.

Predicting Behaviours

Across the design, test and validation lifecycle, digital twins can help anticipate interoperability issues, determine if enhancements will have the necessary impact to support applications and predict how a physical system will perform under any number of conditions. You can even observe how they will perform with future technologies which, given the speed at which technology is evolving, is an increasingly critical function. This ability to anticipate and mitigate impacts will be pivotal for designing, optimising and securing the spectrum of technology from small consumer electronics all the way up to connected smart cities.

Their ability to predict behaviours based on given sets of criteria is quickly making digital twins one of the most powerful tools in the toolbox. Soon, with assistance from digital twins, the question “what if” may replace necessity as the mother of invention.

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