Operational Digital Twins

The digital twins in areas of critical operations function as:

1. a digital knowledge repository for operations, maintenance, and root cause analytics, and
2. raise alerts/notifications for prescriptiove, preventive and predictive maintenance operations.

This is especially true in the armed forces where the equipment last for many decades, there are many generations of subject matter experts who routinely retire and take knowledge away with them, and the need for uptime and reliability is of paramount importance. The ground teams in hostile environments have access to operational twins that help in executing the mission with high levels of reliability.

With critical and complex equipment, the need to investing in high uptime becomes a necessity. When a mission is executed, the availability of equipment determines the likelihood of success - at the sametime, irrespective of the equipment the mission should be successfully completed. And this translates to putting lives at risk due to unavailability of equipment. For these equipment:

• Tacit knowledge
• Root cause analytics
• Historical maintenance information
• Current health
• Operating procedures

should be captured as a single source of truth.

Fabrik creates operational twins that act as a single source of truth. Cross-functional teams ranging from operators to technicians and maintenance folks access the same source of truth to execute jobs that are highlighted as critical. On Fabrik, each equipment is an operational twin of it's real-world counterpart, and reflects the health and performance benchmarks as accurately as the current sources of data and knowledge allow. As more inputs flow into the system, the accuracy of the operational twins improve.

The key advantage of operational twins are two-fold:

1. Reduction in unplanned downtime by 16% leading to increase in available by 80%.
2. Increase useful operational life as a consequence of better maintenance by 40%.

And these numbers for the armed forces mean we free-up locked capital for other capital expenditures that were not possible earlier.

From defence to natural resources, and factory floors to public infrastructure, operational twins are adopted at all levels reflecting the strategic benefits of ubiquitous computing. Operational twins are the next stage to unlock efficiencies that were previously not possible due to the distributed nature of knowledge. At the same time, due to the critical nature of operations, care must be taken to ensure the single source of truth does not become a single point of failure. This creates a large opportunity for secure information storage and dissemination, along with rapid lightweight computing capabilities for quick decision making.