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The Evolution of Industry 4.0 Through Digital Twins
Digital twins transform industries by creating virtual replicas of physical systems, enhancing efficiency, reducing costs, and improving sustainability across sectors.
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Applied Technology Review | Tuesday, July 22, 2025
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Fremont, CA: Digital twins are a revolutionary technology that creates a virtual replica of physical objects or systems throughout their lifecycles. They use real-time data to simulate the physical world, enabling analysis, testing, and maintenance prediction without physical intervention risks. This technology is used in supply chains, marketing, space exploration, and infrastructure development, enhancing efficiency, reducing costs, and driving innovation.
Digital twins can facilitate enhanced customer satisfaction through applications such as predictive maintenance. Since they gather real-time product data, they can facilitate more effective customer service and repair procedures while providing insights for future product developments.
According to the most recent poll, the aerospace and military, industrial machine and electrical equipment, and pharmaceutical industries place a high premium on this advantage. To increase their total productivity and efficiency, businesses in these sectors also prioritize using sophisticated analytics and predictive maintenance capabilities.
This advantage requires patience and the gathering of data via digital twins. Once the first investments are made, engineers and designers may use generational enhancements of a product, which are based on real-world operational data from several digital twins, to guide their work on new product or version development.
Businesses may get ongoing insights into how their goods work in the field using digital twins. They may invent and iterate products more quickly and effectively with the help of these insights. With the use of digital twins and simulation tools, engineers may verify their products' performance before the prototype. This leads to substantial time and cost reductions for expensive items. Digital twins can shorten time-to-market and avoid late-stage redesign.
Encouraging sustainability in all endeavors is a goal that companies are pursuing more and more frequently. Digital twins present potential at every stage of the value chain. Reducing carbon emissions or waste during the production process, switching to more environmentally friendly product ingredients, or cutting back on the number of service truck trips are a few examples.
Digital twins, when included in a larger plan for digital transformation, can offer the information, transparency, and visualization required to boost performance in many sustainability-related areas.
There might occasionally be a secondary advantage to digital twins if you can consider the options. Their dispensers now include digital twin technology to reduce product downtime and maintenance expenses.
They quickly discovered, though, that the information gathered for the digital twin was not only pertinent and useful to their company but also had the potential to advance their clients' operations. For instance, the data showed trends in drink consumption, such as the most popular locations and the best-selling beverages. After that, they could provide clients with these insights on a subscription basis. Owners of bars and restaurants may utilize this information to plan ahead for orders and store inventory more efficiently.
By using digital twins, businesses can better see their data and use the insights it provides to affect not just the bottom line but also the customers, employees, and/or all three.