Input Stories

A recent online master class from the Manufacturing Leadership Council, the NAM’s digital transformation arm, offered exclusive insights, actionable advice and inspiring real-world stories from leading experts about digital twins.

What’s going on: The 50-minute class, “Digital Twins—The Next Frontier in Manufacturing,” moderated by MLC Senior Content Director Penelope Brown, featured SAS Head of Simulation and Gaming William Collis and SAS Head of Games Analytics Paul Gavin.

• More than half of all manufacturers say they use digital twins, “virtual replica[s] of a physical asset process or system that uses real-time data to mirror real-world performance,” Brown said, adding that an additional 23% say they plan to use the tech in the next two years.
• With good reason: Digital twins can help manufacturers optimize facility efficiency, develop new products faster and improve worker safety and maintenance quality, among other benefits.

The Fortnite connection: Software company SAS is using digital twins in a way that might surprise you: leveraging game technologies to build its simulation capabilities.

• “Probably the coolest thing about what we’re doing at SAS [is that we] can use any underlying simulation engine to create simulated worlds or to do simulation analytics,” Collis said. “[W]e partner with Epic Games, the makers of the Unreal Engine, and we are pretty much exclusively using Unreal for our digital twin development. This is the engine behind games like Fortnite … [and] behind most [major] video games today,” he went on.
• The “depth of fidelity” of Unreal’s graphics “allows us to really have a lot of nuance and subtlety and control as we build out our twins,” Collis said. Epic has “a lot of tech that is actually set up to empower twins. Probably the most notable is reality scan, which lets you take your cell phone, scan an object using the camera and get a rough 3D model that’s deployable. [You can use] Unreal as a starting point to building out a true to life one-to-one twin.”

Real-life examples: With the help of SAS, one of the company’s customers—a large paper manufacturer—utilizes digital interfaces to try out various operational scenarios with its automated guided vehicles, “kind of robotic forklifts,” in its manufacturing and distribution spaces.

• “Say you want to try moving paths around and see how it packs your overall throughput in the factory, or how efficiently you can accomplish the set of missions that these AGVs need to do,” Gavin said. “We also have the ability to add AGVs to this facility and simulate what would happen if we had a larger fleet size.”
• Another SAS customer, in the oil and gas sector, employs the technology for predictive maintenance. “[I]f you want to be able to monitor your [rig’s] electrical loads and your pressure throughout a pumping rig like this … you could do that all from this one intuitive interface where you have digital renditions of the objects highlighted for their failure when it’s happening.”
• Unreal can also be used to verify—down to granular detail—the presence of properly used personal protective equipment and other safety measures. “[With] PPE, it’s not just ‘Do you detect safety glasses?’ [but] … ‘Are they truly safety glasses and not corrective glasses?’ ‘Are they being worn on someone’s forehead or on top of their head instead of covering their eyes?’”

The final say: “People [may] be nervous about [this technology], but I do think it is the future,” Gavin concluded. “An important thing to consider is a talent pool of the future. They’re going to have all grown up playing games, and they’re going to expect [user interfaces] that are a little bit nicer. … You’re going to want to interact with software that’s beautiful, easy to use and intuitive. I think that this is a great step in that direction.”