Knowledge Graphs

Chapter 6. Business Digital Twin

A digital twin is a software version of a real world artifact or process. The concept comes from manufacturing where a digitized version of some component or machine can be subjected to a barrage of virtual testing that would be too hazardous, destructive, expensive, or impractical to perform on the real physical entity. Digital twins are high-fidelity models of the real world and are kept synchronized with their counterparts as new data becomes available.

In the modern enterprise, digital twins are no longer just facsimiles of physical artifacts. Contemporary digital twins can include organizations, processes, and even people. They still consume data from the physical environments of their real world counterparts, whether that’s environmental data from Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, packet loss statistics from a network router, or performance and key performance indicator (KPI) data for projects or departments. That data helps the digital twin maintain accuracy over time.

Like its manufacturing counterpart, the enterprise digital twin allows us to reason about the real world and perform all manner of investigations, hypotheses, and abuses to understand how a real system might react. Digital twins can also uncover variances between the as-designed processes and as-implemented processes, surfacing any divergence quickly.

With an enterprise digital twin we can model IT network operations (to look for points of failure or insecurity), optimize ...