Roadmap launched to help guide water’s digital twin journey

A new #DigitalTwin readiness guide has been launched by SWAN, Brown & Caldwell and many industry partners.

Advancing digital twins in water

A new roadmap has been launched by a cross industry collaboration to help advance the implementation of digital twins in the water sector.

Called the ‘Digital Twin Readiness Guide’, the guide provides a framework, steps and path to achieve essential insights leading to more intuitive water systems operations, making the utility more efficient.

“A Digital Twin is a real-time digital counterpart of a physical object or process.”

Spearheaded by the SWAN Forum, Brown and Caldwell, DHI, and with contributions from numerous partners, the zero-cost guide was launched at the SWAN Annual Conference.

At its core, the guide applies SWAN’s state-of-the-art Digital Twin architecture, the water industry standard for planning and implementing Digital Twins.

The SWAN Digital Twin Utility Advisory Group, consisting of representatives from Global Omnium, Sydney Water, Aarhus Vand, Clean Water Services, and DC Water.

What is a digital twin?

Despite the phrase becoming more common, there remains a question as to what is a digital twin?

According to the collaboration: “A Digital Twin is a real-time digital counterpart of a physical object or process. Akin to an airplane’s co-pilot, Digital Twin uses analytical and predictive modeling to speed up and validate decision-making to automate time-consuming and manual engineering or operator processes.”

While Digital Twin implementation is unique to each utility, deployment steps are foundational to achieving optimized, cost-efficient water and wastewater systems.

Digital Twin readiness is scalable, iterative, and likely phased over time, depending on the utility’s unique needs, budget, infrastructure, and software requirements.

Benefits to utilities include better prediction and preparedness for seasonal or climate-driven condition changes, asset and operational health analysis for investment optimization, and what-if scenario simulations for safer training environments.

Global case studies

Global case studies detailing the successful implementation of SWAN’s Digital Twin architecture are included in the guide.

Projects include a Singapore-based water reclamation plant, an urban drainage project for Denmark’s largest wastewater utility, and several water treatment and network projects in Spain and Italy.

- For more information, and to access the Digital Twin Readiness Guide, click here.

Related content

• Digital twins can drive better utility collaboration, finds panel
• Valencia: sun, sea and Digital Twins
• Digital Twins in water what have we learned | Aquatech