Digital Twins

The Water utilities have invested significantly in the use of information and automation technologies over the past several decades to improve service to customers and enable our employees to be more effective and efficient in carrying out their work. Past “digital investments” in the process control and automation, and enterprise IT solutions undertaken by the water utilities each had limitations which complicated the full recognition of achieving the digital maturity for our industry. The current generation of disruptive technologies help remediate many of the limitations of the earlier digital solutions and offer an opportunity to improve the process of decision making and improve business processes to realize targeted business outcomes. Calculations, equations, algorithms, and models supporting and enabling the decision-making process must be improved to achieve higher confidence of recommended decisions and reduction in the decision-making latency. Data modeling and simulation become an integral feature of this digitally transformed utility that helps with scesnario analysis, emergency management, predictive maintenance, operator training and tailored safety programs. Digital Twin is an advanced version of a simulated model or a digital version of an entity. This paper will provide the background and basics of Digital Twins, models used for building the twins, the technology architecture to implement a Digital Twin, and multiple use cases of Digital Twins for energy optimization, process/chemical feed optimization. The case studies are for one of the largest water utilities in the nation that built Digital Twins for various applications including predictive maintenance of vertical assets and operator training.