Cognitive Digital Twins for Smart Manufacturing

The digital twin is an emerging concept whereby a digital replica can be built of any physical object. Many organizations have started to rely on digital twins to monitor, analyze, and simulate physical assets and processes. For simulation, digital twins of machines, processes, and products are created to mimic real settings. Cognitive digital twins will convert traditional digital twins into smart and intelligent agents that can access, analyze, understand, and react to their current status. In case of anomalies, rather than resorting to a simple alert system, the cognitive digital twin can interact with the operational environment and digital twins of products, running processes to further analyze and intelligently understand the anomalies. The cognitive digital twin can draw conclusions of situations locally and then interact with other digital twins of physical assets operating in similar operational conditions to better understand shared local anomalies.