Are AI digital twins a match made in heaven?

Faster model iteration could help engineers raise their aim across a variety of high-stakes use cases

By Fleur Doidge

Published November 25, 2024In Features

Digital twins, detailed virtual recreations of existing places or machinery that can be used to identify inefficiencies or as a testbed for new services and approaches, may be the latest area where AI is making its impact felt.

Savvy generative AI approaches can reduce the work of visualizing real-world dynamics in digital twin projects Ved Sen, head of innovation at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), tells ITPro.

While machine learning (ML) is "super-useful" generally in digital simulations, generative AI may offer extra value for creating highly sophisticated, tailored digital twins, Sen explains.

"This is the space for generative AI, not in the core data that tells you how the asset performs," he says. "Digital twin can be broken into two different elements: real-time data capture to show you how this thing is performing, an asset or process and on the other side taking the time and visualizing the actual thing."

Generative AI may have a role to play in quickly building these virtual environments or iterating on designs using natural language processing. An example might be using data to create an immersive 3D view of an engine, then donning a virtual reality (VR) headset and 'walking around' inside to examine the performance and dynamics in real time as the engine is running.

"There's a fair amount of hard human design work in taking that engineering or concept and visualizing it. Generative AI can play a strong role in the leap between 'here's the data' to 'here's the visual artifact'," says Sen.

A specific 3D artifact that once took six weeks to generate might take two with rendering done by generative AI, Sen suggests. Human input will typically still need to refine it,

"sharpening, polishing and so on", but generative AI helps expedite the modeling and adjustment of complexity, controlling multiple dynamics and parameters, he says. ...

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