Gaining Industrial Foresight with Digital Twins Imagine operating a business where you get advance warning of every hurdle that lies ahead, and the ability to remove those hurdles before you get to them. That is just one aspect of the myriad benefits of the Industrial Metaverse, encompassing use cases across plants, machinery and supply chains. “The Industrial Metaverse is a virtual world, which is a representation of the real world,” said Annika Hauptvogel, head of technology & innovation management at Siemens based out of Munich in Germany. Hauptvogel leads the strategy department of Siemens Technology, the main driver of the company’s core technologies, and the Siemens Innovation Ecosystem. The Industrial Metaverse provides participants immersive experiences and simulations that are photorealistic, physics-based and in real time, she added. An example of such high-end simulation is the digital twin, which is at the heart of the Industrial Metaverse, according to Hauptvogel. Although the term digital twin was first coined in 2002, it has achieved maturity now, according to a Siemens blog post. Ian McGann, director of Siemens Innovation Office, defines a digital twin as “a precise virtual representation of a physical object, including its mechanical, electrical, and configuration management. This one digital twin evolves across its lifecycle with numerous models used to capture different aspects of the object’s physical behavior.” The digital twin has now evolved into an “executable digital twin,” or “xDT” that allows real-time simulations of say, a wind turbine,” to predict its performance and pre-empt maintenance issues, said McGann in an interview for the blog post. The digital twin can access a wide array of technology tools. Hauptvogel listed those tools: Artificial intelligence to help make predictions; machine learning with the data captured from the devices or machines it replicates;