“Look and Act”. This is a neat description of a Digital Twin: a digital copy of a physical system that consently looks at a physical system and can act back upon it. Both the “looking” and the “acting” are in real-time, and the digital copy is some form of model.
A Digital Shadow is a Digital Twin without the automatic action on the system. Thing a car spedo – constantly monitoring the system (the car) and giving information in real time (the car’s speed), but there is a human making the actions on the car. With this crude example, cruise control is a Digital Twin, given it can make changes to the system in real time. But that is obviously not an example from agriculture.
This project is sponsored by Kunskapsnav för jordbrukets digitalisering (crudely translated to “Knowledge hub for the digitalisaiton of agriculture”) at Linköping University. It is a simple scan of what is currently available in the world
- Timespan: 2025-01 to 2025-04
- Budget: 100 hours
- Report: During April 2025.
DEFINITION OF A DIGITAL TWIN
The definition of a Digital Twin that is adopted in this project is given above: a virtual copy of a physical system, with real-time input (from sensors in the physcial, to the virtual) and control (from the virtual to the physical). This is not the only definition of a Digital Twin.
The original development of Digital Twins seems to have been in places where engineers are busy, like cars and rockets and the like. They were developed as a means of both better and more rapid prototyping. So, the models were constructed and updated on sensor data, but they didn’t necessarily have the feedback loop that is described in the definition used above. There is also the trend of breaking them up into different scales: component, asset, system, and process. This is possibly a useful distinction to make when describing the resolution of the model, but really they just seem like they are all models of systems just with different boundaries.
HIGHLIGHTS OF THE SCAN
Techonolgies scanned: 10
Uses: Machinery, machiney, machinery: harvests, sprayers, and robots. Also one on irrigation. Oh, and one “Digital Twin” of the entire earth.