Digital twins in practice: building a working twin and asking what if

Digital Twin Training ran on 17 and 18 September 2025 at GIK Institute, Topi, as a two-day technical programme. Attendees created a working twin of a sample process, then used it to run what-if scenarios against that model.

The what-if part is the point. A twin that only mirrors current state is a dashboard. A twin becomes useful when you can change an input, push the model past its normal operating window, and see the consequence without stopping a real line or damaging real equipment.

We teach simulation before hardware for the same reason. A participant who has already broken a virtual machine a dozen times approaches the physical one with a much better sense of what the limits are.

The following month, in the AR/VR and Digital Twin workshop at the Data Analytics Lab, FCSE, participants connected an immersive scene directly to a digital twin model of a physical asset — the natural next step from this training.