Last year I embarked on my ‘Top Tech Trends to Look Out For in 2019’ series, drawing on Gartner’s predictions for the year to come. Kicking off the new year, I’m focusing on Digital Twins – what are they and how will they influence technology?
A digital twin is a digital representation of a physical object or system. The technology has allowed digital representations of just about anything you can think of and can even include larger things such as buildings and cities; conceptually even people could have digital twins.
This technology can be applied and used in a huge number of different sectors and for different purposes – construction, transportation and manufacturing to name a few. Challenging objects, being manufactured, could easily be designed and then tested using a digital twin before being produced.
The role of an architect when creating digital twins will be an important one. Digital twins require a huge amount of data to work well. Alongside being able to work with this data, an architect could require expertise in a number of different skill sets such as A.I, data science and machine learning. Architects will therefore need to be able to consider integration, security and cost when creating digital twins to ensure that it would be a viable and sensible investment for a business.
This is the 2nd time in a row that Gartner has labelled digital twins as a top trend for the year to come. Indeed, Gartner believe that digital twins are not going anywhere, but what do you think about this technology and the role an architect will play in its evolution?
