If in the past, people's positioning of digital twins was just a digital image of the real world, then now, in addition to images, in many industries, it has also become a new digital control of the real world through more complex designs and technologies. device.
On this ship moving forward, what has changed is not only the wider waters ahead, but also the increasingly rich and diverse market ecology on it. In 2023, digital twins are driving into the depths of the industry.
Author|Pi Ye
Produced | Industrialist
Taking off from the front station, getting the aircraft into position, gearing up, docking on the covered bridge... the tractor is in place and the aircraft takes off. 19 links are advanced in an orderly manner, ultimately forming the entire path of an aircraft from arrival to departure.
This is a scene that happens countless times every day at Pudong Airport. However, unlike the previous reliance on manual processes and ensuring a safe environment, now, based on video AI technology, intelligent analysis and output of results can be achieved based on the comprehensive collection of all types of aircraft data.
At present, this system has achieved all-round protection for 19 nodes in the flight ground operation process, covering 290 aircraft seats.
This is the digital twin platform of Pudong Airport. Based on technologies such as video AI, Pudong Airport can effectively support airport operation functional requirements such as flight auxiliary decision-making, resource allocation, prediction and early warning, and optimized control. In addition, based on the three-dimensional twin scene, the airport has also built an apron simulated driving training system to simulate scenarios where environmental recognition errors are prone to occur, effectively reducing the daily operation risks of the airport.
Digital twin technology is accelerating into reality.
In the past few years, this technology has become a special presence in China's industrial digitization. According to incomplete statistics, from 2021 to 2022, more than 150 documents issued by more than 20 provinces mentioned "digital twins". As a key core technology in the information field that needs breakthroughs, digital twins have been included in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and other places. in the scientific and technological innovation plan.
Not only in urban construction, but also on the industrial side. Whether it is in factory production lines and equipment maintenance scenarios, or in biological simulation models for auxiliary treatment in the medical field, or in real-life modeling of buildings, etc., digital twin technology is increasingly appearing in the role of digital underlying facilities. .
"Digital twins are entering every aspect of society. From the perspective of application depth, they are moving from the earlier emphasis on good-looking, realistic restoration, and rendering effects to the stage of computation, predictability, and interactivity." As the head of Tencent's digital twin business The person in charge, Zhang Shaoyu, believes that the role of digital twins in the industry is undergoing some changes.
True enough. If in the past, people's positioning of digital twins was just a digital image of the real world, then now, in addition to images, in many industries, it has also become a new digital control of the real world through more complex designs and technologies. device.
On this ship moving forward, what has changed is not only the wider waters ahead, but also the increasingly rich and diverse market ecology on it. In 2023, digital twins are driving into the depths of the industry.
1. “From 1 to N”, digital twins travel to the depths of the water
In October 2018, Ruitai Magang and his party were invited to visit Tencent Binhai Building. Among them, Chairman Jiang Yuxiang was also in the visiting team. During this trip, the intelligence of Tencent Binhai Building impressed him and his accompanying leaders and colleagues. Very impressed.
Marina Building
Ruitai Magang was established in 2017. Although it is backed by Maanshan Iron and Steel Group and Ruitai Technology, the outdated operating model of the steel industry itself has still become a limitation for this steel company. A microcosm is that in the past ten years or so, the Maanshan Iron and Steel Group behind it has also carried out more than ten digital reforms, but has always achieved little results.
The purpose of Jiang Yuxiang's trip is to learn from Tencent. It was also in this year that Ruitai Magang officially decided to start the “Digital Long March”.
The process is difficult, but the results are beautiful. In September 2019, the first version of the "Transparent Factory" system was born. Through a huge terminal screen in the background, you can see the 1:1 restored on-site production space and equipment in real time, and it has already shown some preliminary effects, such as quickly discovering A batch of inventory has expired.
Ruitai Magang
In the following year, this "transparent factory" began to iterate continuously, from the initial coarse-grained inventory display to the later refined inventory management, from the basic factory production line presentation to the direct intervention in warehousing, ingredients, paper burning, etc. In the production process, a "factory" with real guiding significance was officially built.
Ruitai Magang is just the epitome of this. That is to say, what it shows is the accelerated implementation of digital twin technology in increasingly vertical industries such as industry.
This popularity is not unfounded. According to data from a report titled "China's Digital Twin Industry Development Status Research and Future Investment Forecast Report", companies that apply digital twin solutions globally have a revenue growth rate of more than 50%. At the same time, the report also pointed out that by 2025, the digital twin market will exceed US$33 billion.
However, in reality, this is not an easy task. "Digital twins do not have a fixed service form. They are more specifically constructed based on customer needs." Zhang Shaoyu said.
Behind this expression corresponds to the difficulty of implementing digital twins in the industry. That is, unlike standardized TO B software such as CRM and ERP on the market, digital twins are more of a "project delivery", that is, based on enterprise Design in a manner corresponding to the purpose of transformation. This kind of design ranges from the real management of the offline world such as Ruitai Magang and Pudong Airport to the most basic 3D presentation of buildings. They are all within the scope of digital twins. Previously, an industry investor would tell industrialists that although digital twins have become popular in recent years, compared with the incompatibility of software within enterprises, it is still difficult to implement and adapt twin projects on the enterprise side.
Regarding the development stages of digital twin technology, the industry generally divides it into four categories. The initial level is scene reproduction, display and description, which is based on data sources such as satellite images to enable the digital twin world to have visualization capabilities; the second stage is The mapping and interaction of real-time data enables the digital twin world to have the ability to interact in both directions; the third stage is called intelligent analysis and prediction. Based on the former, the digital twin world has the ability to integrate the past, present and future. Provide people with scientific decision-making support basis; the last step is intervention, transformation and optimization, that is, the plan can be sent to the device to link with the real world to change people's behavior. It has the capabilities of dynamic learning verification and iterative improvement, making the digital twin a complete closed loop.
But in real projects, the requirements for service providers become greater in the later stages. If the first two links require more basic rendering and data collection and presentation capabilities, they only correspond to a single large display screen. So for the latter two links, they examine more in-depth technologies such as AI computing, cloud computing, game-level rendering, speech semantic understanding, etc. On the business side, they also include a series of links such as data collection and model building.
In addition to this, in addition to the capabilities of the service providers themselves, they also have requirements for the enterprises themselves. That is, in the specific steps of building many digital twins, the enterprises themselves need to have IT thinking and IT teams to be able to carry out corresponding "images" according to the business. design and construction.
This is not the capability that most service providers and companies have.
So, now that digital twins are accelerating into the depths of the industry, or now that people want to have stronger intervention and decision-making power in real scenarios, what kind of service ecosystem should the digital twin market match? Among them, what should be the future direction of products, channels and companies seeking transformation?
2. Who is taking a step forward?
Recently, a new move in the digital twin track has attracted a lot of attention from insiders. At this year's Tencent Digital Ecosystem Conference, Tencent Digital Twins officially announced an upgrade, which is to build a "1+3" product matrix based on five core capabilities: spatial construction, IoT perception, spatiotemporal computing, realistic rendering, and simulation deduction.
Among them, "1" corresponds to the digital twin base, and "3" refers to the three major platforms on top of the base, namely the visualization platform, the real-time simulation platform, and the spatial real-time computing platform, aiming to create a good-looking, calculable, easy-to-manage, A well-controlled one-stop digital twin platform.
Tencent digital twin product matrix
It can be understood that while Tencent’s layout on the digital twin side is taking a step forward, it is also providing a new solution for the industry.
Taking the visualization platform as an example, its core provides data visualization rendering capabilities based on multi-engine, multi-platform, full scene, cloud rendering, dynamic and static combination, and two- and three-dimensional integration, which can realize real-time data-driven visual display.
At the same time, on top of this, the platform also has more than 1,000 component tools and rich models. Enterprises can quickly build twin scenarios in a "zero code" way.
Another example is the real-time simulation platform and the space real-time computing platform. The core capabilities provided by the former are general distributed parallel simulation capabilities, open simulation model integration capabilities, and real-time online calibration capabilities based on real-time data input, which can help rapid enterprises accurately perform simulation calculations. , the simulation consistency can reach 99.9%; while the latter, through spatial perception, spatial computing, spatial analysis, spatial search and other capabilities, can support millisecond-level spatio-temporal calculations in high-speed dynamically changing scenarios such as vehicle driving and drone flight.
digital twin highway
In the product matrix, the underlying digital twin base is very critical. From a functional point of view, its core provides three major capabilities: IoT sensing, spatial structure, and data fusion. A more specific achievement is in the field of IoT sensing, which has covered more than 90% of IoT protocol types and implemented tens of millions of Level of equipment online concurrency; in the field of spatial construction, based on large model lightweight algorithms such as the three-dimensional space shelling algorithm independently developed by Tencent, a model compression ratio of 99.5% can be achieved, solving the application problems of spatial digitization and large-scale spatial data ; In the field of multi-dimensional data fusion, it is possible to achieve complete code-free access and orchestration of physical data, spatial data and business data. It has accumulated rich best practices in many fields such as energy and carbon management, linkage alarms, and smart security. Business practice can realize business out-of-the-box implementation and rapid delivery and implementation.
From an enterprise level, what is different from previous announcements based on various technologies is that Tencent's digital twin now combines various technical capabilities with specific digital twin scenarios for further combination and packaging, showing more industry knowhow to the outside world. product interface.
In this product interface, what can be perceived is not only Tencent’s accumulation in the underlying technology of digital twins, but also attributes that are more suitable for the industry such as “industry attributes”, “ease of use” and “openness”.
It can be said that this is becoming an option for the above-mentioned industrial problems. That is, based on the product interface of Tencent's digital twin, whether it is an ecological partner or an enterprise undergoing transformation, it can carry out digital innovation and practice at a lower threshold and at a lower cost.
"Tencent may not necessarily be good at every major. We still focus on some of the core values of Twin itself, such as some diversified and personalized needs in a large number of industries. We prefer to work with partners." Zhang Guo, vice president of digital twin products at Tencent, told us.
He said that Tencent's approach is to break down different benchmark projects in detail, generate some corresponding rules and models, and finally aggregate and digitally present them on the product and solution side, and open them to industry partners.
These dismantled benchmarks are not only projects such as Pudong Airport and Ruitai Magang, but also in urban scenes and other industrial directions.
For example, Tencent helped Shenzhen Baoan create a smart transportation digital twin base. This transportation digital twin base is computable, evolvable, and deducible. It has now become the core support upgrade for the operation of Shenzhen Baoan’s smart bus, comprehensive management and other business systems; another example is , Tencent helped Huizhou City, Guangdong Province build the "Smooth Project" urban traffic real-time twin traffic management system. Based on this system, dynamic monitoring of the entire life cycle of road infrastructure can be achieved, providing accurate basis for road traffic diagnosis and traffic management decision-making.
It is worth mentioning that this is the country's first large-scale innovative traffic congestion control project that implements "integrated sensing + holographic road network + digital twin + C-side services". It now covers 140 intersections and 300 kilometers of road networks.
On the industrial side, Tencent has created a unified real-time twin platform for Zoomlion to help realize a digital smart park management model, establish immersive management capabilities in multiple scenarios such as security, transportation, office, and energy, and help it establish independent and controllable A number of self-developed technologies and products, such as digital twin scene orchestration, IoT device access management and application low-code development, support Zhongke Cloud Valley to quickly develop independent smart park project delivery and implementation capabilities.
In fact, it can be understood that this is the confidence and industry structure behind the new interface of Tencent’s digital twin product. Nowadays, these encapsulated product matrices and diversified practical models such as low-code are becoming professional and open digital twin weapons and the underlying infrastructure of the digital twin industry.
3. What kind of digital world do we need?
Or let’s go back to the essential question we often discuss on digital twins, that is, “What kind of digital world do we need to build?”
As mentioned before, digital twins are not as concrete as SaaS software, nor are they the same as pure technical backgrounds such as AI and cloud computing. However, in this new digital model, we can see more realistic digital scenarios. and more core industrial elements, these scenarios cover transportation, environment, construction, industrial production, intelligent manufacturing, etc.
At the same time, it is gradually demonstrating more powerful digital value. From being visible at the beginning to being analyzable, interactive and interventionable today, digital twins have also been transformed into real productivity and become a part of the digital wave. an increasingly important path.
But the process is obviously difficult. Whether it is the enterprise's understanding of digital twins, the uneven capabilities of service providers in the digital twin service market, or the cost and implementation threshold of the digital twin project itself, these are all factors that stand in the way of this technology moving towards greater productivity. obstacles between.
In fact, this is also the value of companies like Tencent. That is to say, based on valuable enough benchmarks, Tencent Digital Twins continues to polish its own product interface, while also constantly amplifying the market's value recognition of digital twin technology to the outside world.
At the same time, based on the bottom-level open role it has defined for itself, whether it is a partner that focuses on products and more vertical solutions, or an ecological enterprise that focuses more on services in channels, they can get more professional bottom-level support, and then overall Promote the progress and leap of the entire digital twin track.
It is understood that Tencent’s digital twin partners now exceed 300, including industry software and hardware partners, as well as specific channel service providers.
Furthermore, changes are happening.
“Now we are also participating in the formulation of some standards, including the number of digital twin-related patent authorizations in August this year, which included 267 families and a total of 433 patents.” Zhang Guo said, “What we want to do is to standardize the relevant capabilities and open them up through Tencent’s openness. The platform and partners are transmitted to all walks of life, to all small and medium-sized enterprises and various industries, so that they can do what they want to do through digital twin technology."
In this digital track that needs to be walked hand in hand, win-win and symbiosis is becoming the core rhythm.
For Tencent and a number of domestic digital twin companies and partners, whether it is the Binhai Building, the "Quanzhen Internet Airport" or the "Transparent Factory", behind these high-profile projects are signaling a more positive future. Signal: A new blue ocean market for digital twins has opened.
At the same time, the answer to that question - the vision of "making the digital world more real and the real world better" is also accelerating into reality.