Digital twins have the potential to provide unprecedented opportunities to deliver real-time, operational insights that can drive performance improvement and support enhanced autonomous operations. But building a comprehensive digital twin is difficult. Can we secure benefits — today — by leveraging enhanced service assurance data, enabled by DataOps processing?
Digital twins are attracting considerable attention from a range of different industries. The basic concept is simple: they provide a complete, virtual replica of operational assets, which allows asset owners to experiment, model impact of changes, explore optimization.
For example, The Economist has noted how Digital Twins are helping diverse sectors such as manufacturing, aerospace and Formula 1, to name a few examples. Digital Twins, the author writes:
Will redefine what it means to run a company. Instead of coordinating disparate islands of automation, as is the case today, bosses will manage a constantly churning ‘flywheel’ fueled by data.
The Digital Twin Consortium (DTC) echoes this view, stating that:
By using a virtual model of an entire area or process, organizations can visualize and test out different initiatives, making data-driven decisions based on billions of network performance data points. These initiatives can then be evaluated through more precise enterprise-level analytics and location intelligence, to help identify optimal implementation scenarios.
That sounds very promising – but it could be applied to any industry or sector. So, what could this mean for telecoms networks and operators? Well, one of the roles of the DTC is to explore uses cases across sectors, essentially building templates and reference models, as well as best-practice guidelines.
You don’t have to look far to see how Digital Twins could benefit every kind of operator. For example, it notes that:
“Digital twins can simulate the propagation of radio waves in various environments and identify the optimal placement of antennas and repeaters for maximum coverage and signal strength. A digital twin of a satellite communications system or cellular tower can monitor its performance in real time and identify potential issues or faults before they become critical.”
Essentially, they not only provide an accurate representation of the physical assets deployed, but they also provide a playground for simulation. As such, it’s no surprise that telecoms operators understand the potential that they can offer.
Building a Digital Twin is, however, challenging. Why?