Session

Track: Strategy and Business Value

Case Study: Developing Bespoke Digital Twins for Bespoke Client Needs!
Marin Pastar & Jim Kessler

There are many digital twin presentations that discuss their benefits, constraints, requirements, etc. – even showcases of digital twin platforms that may be the solution for developing your digital twins.

But how many presentations showcase the end result of bespoke, real-word digital twins built for specific purposes?

That’s what this presentation will do. This session will showcase two digital twins built on vastly different platforms to serve the unique needs of the organizations they were built for.

The first digital twin was built for the sole purpose of streamlining and simplifying Maximo-based facility management workflows by providing end users with rich geospatial context for all maintainable assets across multiple facilities. The digital twin also provides facility managers with an ability to access all critical asset information, including active work orders, in the field on an iPad. This ArcGIS Indoors-powered digital twin not only provides all asset information and documentation in one place, but it also allows end users to access and edit live Maximo asset data, add asset photos, and even report BIM model discrepancies via FME Server and Survey123.

The second showcase exhibits the full power of bespoke digital twins. Originally built to visually simulate real-world effects of various major flood events to a specific site with both existing and new facilities still in the design phase, this unreal engine-powered digital twin has since been extended to integrate reality capture data, asset data, and live connections to various data-reporting systems, all built to serve very specific client needs.

In this session, we will provide you with an overview of the process it took to develop and document functional requirement, why and how we chose the platforms we did, and how we developed and connected the resultant digital twins to provide the functionality that was needed.

Data Orchestration: The Real Challenges to Achieving Twinness
Robert Manna

The core premise of a digital twin is not new. The control platforms for individual building systems have effectively been ‘mini’ digital twins since the initial migration to silicon-based solutions in lieu of analog controls. What is ‘new’ is the greater opportunities afforded by decreasing costs (sensors, bandwidth, data storage), ‘system(s)’ that allow data extraction as well as the popularity of 3D models and scanning.

The desire to capture all data in a manner that allows disparate parts to be meaningfully connected also is not new. This data structuring and standardization takes on even more importance if you truly intend to relate different data sets between various systems cohesively to allow for useful (and reliable) data analysis.

Previously, the control systems implementor could sketch out how a particular system’s controls would be implemented (per what the contractor built and what the engineer designed) and subsequently toss out the ‘sketch’ once the control system was running. Fast forward to the digital age; that ‘sketch’ must now be captured. It is the key element that connects the dots between the physical system, monitoring, and control.

This is data orchestration in a nutshell.

This session will focus on real-world case studies of assisting customers in identifying, building and implementing data orchestration paths. We will focus on four different contexts: building an infrastructure, connecting dots converting data, and data ‘roundtripping.’

Taking the time to invest in data orchestration is critical to providing a reliable foundation for managing successful digital twins.