The Industrial Metaverse will help simplify the complexities that are intrinsic to enterprises.
Right now, many organisations are at the ‘Monitoring’ stage where data from connected devices such as sensors on generators or vibration monitors on a turbine can be gathered and represented in a dashboard. Others may already have digital twins of their machines and equipment that are collating real time data from the physical versions and outputting this on a dashboard or even something as basic as an excel spreadsheet.
These are effectively the first stages of the evolution towards the Industrial Metaverse and the value of managing this data optimally cannot be underestimated. There is clear recognition across all levels of manufacturing that data, crucially the capability to manage the massive amounts that will form the central nervous system of the Industrial Metaverse. The ability to lleverage it to make critical business decisions is one of the biggest challenges all industries are facing right now and it will only become more complicated in the near future.
Data is king
“Data has become the lifeblood of businesses today,” a Forbes article stated in response to a survey carried out by Forrester Consulting. In their whitepaper: The Industrial Metaverse needs a Strong Data Fabric Hitachi echoed the very same notion, sharing their observation that data management is the greatest consideration when it comes to enabling the industrial metaverse because “data will be the lifeblood of the industrial metaverse”, gathering it, analysing it, leveraging it, making sense of it, exploiting it, getting it to the right place at the right time.
The UK government’s Innovation through data paper further recognised the critical role data has to play stating that: “Data is now the driving force of the world’s modern economies. It fuels innovation in businesses large and small.”
Yet many organisations struggle to manage the sheer volume of data that passes through their various workflows with 76% stating that they found it difficult to understand their data and are therefore unable to exploit it to its full potential and gain increased intelligence from it. The survey also found that ‘decision makers do not have enough collaboration between teams and tools to achieve their outcomes’.
Beyond the data – taking it to the next stage of utility
What will the ability to manage data optimally mean? Why is it such a crucial step towards the creation of the Industrial Metaverse? It can be hard to see the wood for the trees if, like many organisations, data management constitutes a challenge. Yet, once data integration, quality, security and analysis are all in hand, businesses will find themselves in a good position to move on to the next stage in the journey towards the Industrial Metaverse which is ‘Action’.
So you have managed to clean up your data and get it to the highest quality possible, you have your digital twin that is providing you with real time insights, what next? Now it’s time to layer your data on top of your digital twin and start generating good enough quality simulations that can be used to analyse key facets of your operations to identify any current problem areas, plan activities and enhance situational awareness.
The future at your fingertips
Once you have connected digital twins and removed business information silos, the next step is ‘Forecasting’. At this point, insights from data can be used to predict operational outcomes and provide alerts for upcoming maintenance or warning regarding potential issues that could become a costly disruption to your workflow. Beyond being predictive, by running complex, high fidelity simulations that are being fed real time data and are utilising machine learning, you can begin to test out ‘what-is’ and ‘what-if’ scenarios that are likely to impact your business. There will be more freedom to trial and test with ease whilst avoiding risk meaning that new learnings will be derived more rapidly. The data driven insights that are generated will form the bedrock of your operational decision-making. The decisions made can also be fed back into the digital twin simulation as a standard for best practice which can be iterated upon for continuous improvement.
We begin to reach the realisation of the Industrial Metaverse once these digital twin simulations are working autonomously. They will have the capability to use and learn from multiple data feeds in order to self correct issues and proactively suggest ways to optimise processes.
The future is now
Hadean’s market proven, distributed computing technology enables the deployment and operation of complex synthetic simulations, with scalability, interoperability and security as primary considerations.
Our software is able to host as well as integrate complex modelling and simulations with multiple layers such as a rail network with station information, track and engineering updates, weather, footfall data and historical data into a predictive digital twin. These digital twins can then be run through our software in order to gain detailed insights that can be stress-tested using unlimited ‘what-if’ scenarios for high quality decision-making.
If you are ready to revolutionise your operations and take the next step towards the future, get in touch with us to discuss how our technology can support your industrial transformation.