Real Words or Buzzwords?: Digital Twin - RBCS - Ray Bernard Consulting Services

This is the 38th article in the “Real Words or Buzzwords?” series about how real words become empty words and stifle technology progress.

By Ray Bernard, PSP, CHS-III

Though few in physical security are familiar with the concept, it holds enormous potential for the industry.

All-in-one RWOB

#1 Proof of the buzzword that killed tech advances in the security industry—but not other industries.

#2 Next Generation (NextGen): A sure way to tell hype from reality.

#3 Customer Centric: Why all security industry companies aren't customer centric.

#4 Best of Breed: What it should mean to companies and their customers.

#5 Open: An openness scale to rate platforms and systems

#6 Network-friendly: It's much more than network connectivity.

#7 Mobile first: Not what it sounds like.

#8 Enterprise Class (Part One): To qualify as Enterprise Class system today is world's beyond what it was yesterday.

#9 Enterprise Class (Part Two): Enterprise Class must be more than just a top-level label.

#10 Enterprise Class (Part Three): Enterprise Class must be 21st century technology.

#11 Intuitive: It’s about time that we had a real-world testable definition for “intuitive”.

#12 State of the Art: A perspective for right-setting our own thinking about technologies.

#13 True Cloud (Part One): Fully evaluating cloud product offerings.

#14 True Cloud (Part Two): Examining the characteristics of 'native-cloud' applications.

#15 True Cloud (Part Three): Due diligence in testing cloud systems.

#16 IP-based, IP-enabled, IP-capable, or IP-connectable?: A perspective for right-setting our own thinking about technologies.

#17 Five Nines: Many people equate high availability with good user experience, yet many more factors are critically important.

#18 Robust: Words like “robust” must be followed by design specifics to be meaningful.

#19 Serverless Computing – Part 1: Why "serverless computing" is critical for some cloud offerings.

#20 Serverless Computing – Part 2: Why full virtualization is the future of cloud computing.

#21 Situational Awareness – Part 1: What products provide situational awareness?

#22 Situational Awareness – Part 2: Why system designs are incomplete without situational awareness?

#23 Situational Awareness – Part 3: How mobile devices change the situational awareness landscape?

#24 Situational Awareness – Part 4: Why situational awareness is a must for security system maintenance and acceptable uptime.

#25 Situational Awareness – Part 5: We are now entering the era of smart buildings and facilities. We must design integrated security systems that are much smarter than those we have designed in the past.

#26 Situational Awareness – Part 6: Developing modern day situational awareness solutions requires moving beyond 20th century thinking.

#27 Situational Awareness – Part 7: Modern day incident response deserves the help that modern technology can provide but doesn’t yet. Filling this void is one of the great security industry opportunities of our time.

#28 Unicity: Security solutions providers can spur innovation by envisioning how the Unicity concept can extend and strengthen physical access into real-time presence management.

#29 The API Economy: Why The API Economy will have a significant impact on the physical security industry moving forward.

#31 The Built Environment: In the 21st century, “the built environment” means so much more than it did just two decades ago.

#32 Hyper-Converged Infrastructure: Hyper-Converged Infrastructure has been a hot phrase in IT for several years, but do its promises hold true for the physical security industry?

#33 Software-Defined: Cloud-computing technology, with its many software-defined elements, is bringing self-scaling real-time performance capabilities to physical security system technology.

#34 High-Performance: How the right use of "high-performance" can accelerate the adoption of truly high-performing emerging technologies.

#35 Erasure Coding: Why RAID drive arrays don’t work anymore for video storage, and why Erasure Coding does.

#36 Presence Control: Anyone responsible for access control management or smart building experience must understand and apply presence control.

#37 Internet+: The Internet has evolved into much more than the information superhighway it was originally conceived to be.

#38 Digital Twin: Though few in physical security are familiar with the concept, it holds enormous potential for the industry.

#39 Fog Computing: Though commonly misunderstood, the concept of fog computing has become critically important to physical security systems.

#40 Scale - Part 1: Although many security-industry thought leaders have advocated that we should be “learning from IT,” there is still insufficient emphasis on learning about IT practices, especially for large-scale deployments.

#41 Scale - Part 2: Why the industry has yet to fully grasp what the ‘Internet of Things’ means for scaling physical security devices and systems.

#42 Cyberspace - Part 1: Thought to be an outdated term by some, understanding ‘Cyberspace’ and how it differs from ‘Cyber’ is paramount for security practitioners.

#43 Cyber-Physical Systems - Part 1: We must understand what it means that electronic physical security systems are cyber-physical systems.

#44 Cyberspace - Part 2: Thought to be an outdated term by some, understanding ‘Cyberspace’ and how it differs from ‘Cyber’ is paramount for security practitioners.

#45 Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Deep Learning: Examining the differences in these technologies and their respective benefits for the security industry.

#46 VDI – Virtual Desktop Infrastructure: At first glance, VDI doesn’t seem to have much application to a SOC deployment. But a closer look reveals why it is actually of critical importance.

#47 Hybrid Cloud: The definition of hybrid cloud has evolved, and it’s important to understand the implications for physical security system deployments.

#48 Legacy: How you define ‘legacy technology’ may determine whether you get to update or replace critical systems.

#49 H.264 - Part 1: Examining the terms involved in camera stream configuration settings and why they are important.

#50 H.264 - Part 2: A look at the different H.264 video frame types and how they relate to intended uses of video.

#51 H.264 - Part 3: Once seen as just a marketing term, ‘smart codecs’ have revolutionized video compression.

#52 Presence Technologies: The proliferation of IoT sensors and devices, plus the current impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, have elevated the capabilities and the importance of presence technologies.

#53 Anonymization, Encryption and Governance: The exponential advance of information technologies requires an exponential advance in the application of data protection.

#54 Computer Vision: Why a good understanding of the computer vision concept is important for evaluating today’s security video analytics products.

#55 Exponential Technology Advancement: The next 10 years of security technology will bring more change than in the entire history of the industry to now.

#56 IoT and IoT Native: The next 10 years of security technology will bring more change than in the entire history of the industry to now.

#57 Cloud Native IoT: The next 10 years of security technology will bring more change than in the entire history of the industry to now.

#58 Bluetooth vs. Bluetooth LE: The next 10 years of security technology will bring more change than in the entire history of the industry to now.

More to come about every other week.

While there are numerous definitions that can be found for “Digital Twin” and what it encompasses, the term, in its most basic form, is used to describe an electronic copy of something that exists in the physical world. Per Wikipedia: “Digital twin refers to a digital replica of physical assets (physical twin), processes, people, places, systems and devices that can be used for various purposes. The digital representation provides both the elements and the dynamics of how an Internet of Things (IoT) device operates and lives throughout its life cycle.” Since electronic physical security systems contain from hundreds to thousands of IoT devices, it certainly seems like an applicable concept.

However, it’s a very broad concept that covers a lot of ground: processes, people, places, systems and devices. It’s a commonly understood term in many IT domains. First, because IT service management uses digital twins of IT infrastructure to monitor and predictively service the infrastructure to prevent outages. Second, because software engineers and coders are the people who create most digital twins.

Although few people in physical security are familiar with the term, it’s very relevant in at least three domains.

Infrastructure Management

Local, regional, national and global physical security systems all have IT and IoT based electronic systems infrastructure that requires IT and IoT tools to manage that provide and act on infrastructure situational awareness. Some of the IT infrastructure is moving to the cloud, but not all of it, as cameras and other sensors, as well as control devices such as for physical access, must remain on-premises. IT has been using digital twin technology for most of the past decade for infrastructure management. Viakoo comes to mind as the leader in this area.

Smart Buildings

Smart buildings are built environments that use digital twin technology to varying degrees for managing (monitoring and controlling) the occupant and visitor building experience. Security technology and systems can play a much bigger role that it currently does, for example via integrations involving indoor locating, security video and AI-enhanced video analytics, and digital signage.

Currently, building use access card presentations and/or elevator call kiosks serve that purpose, but they single points of interface aren’t a good match for high-volume visitor periods, or emergency evacuation scenarios. Heat map and/or people-counting information from video cameras could increase the accuracy of priority-setting in busy elevator systems across a wider set of operations scenarios.

Presence Control

An earlier article on presence control presents the emerging concept for extending physical access control into open areas and building shared, common and use-on-demand spaces, and thanks to emerging technology is a highly workable concept. For example, some R&D and manufacturing facilities have high visitor and contractor traffic, and experience situations in which multiple customer visitors are competitors to each other, and so must be kept in separate building spaces where they won’t cross paths. A presence control digital twin is a great way to do this, whether it is a visual model or an operational model that manages the situation by scheduling of meeting rooms, visitor arrival and departure times, and visitor sponsor notifications.

Systems that maintain awareness of personnel locations can be an effective part of emergency response planning in numerous ways. For example, by pairing up at-risk individuals (accident, health emergency, individuals needing special assistance in evacuations) with designated trained response personnel in closest proximity.

There are also situations in manufacturing and mining facilities where if people spend a certain amount of time in Building A, they can’t go into Building B because Building A chemicals are still in their bloodstream from breathing Building A’s air, and they can’t safely breathe in Building B’s air. RightCrowd has technology that addresses such situations and more, via integration with facility access control systems.

In active assailant situations

Design Thinking

Digital twin technology provides:

Real-time functionality
Preventive, predictive and responsive situation assessment per an updated knowledge base
Automatic actions with audit trail per configuration and programming
Ongoing situational awareness and assistive action support to human responders

Whether looking to improve the built environment experience for occupants and visitors, or addressing risk situations, digital twin technology can become a big help as long as we keep it in our design “thinking caps”.

Let’s Catch Up with Technology

Digital twin concepts and technologies is another are where the physical security industry lags IT and other industries. Although several security technologies have emerged using digital twin elements, we need more of them.

Ray Bernard, PSP CHS-III, is the principal consultant for Ray Bernard Consulting Services (RBCS), a firm that provides security consulting services for public and private facilities (www.go-rbcs.com). In 2018 IFSEC Global listed Ray as #12 in the world’s Top 30 Security Thought Leaders. He is the author of the Elsevier book Security Technology Convergence Insights available on Amazon. Mr. Bernard is a Subject Matter Expert Faculty of the Security Executive Council (SEC) and an active member of the ASIS International member councils for Physical Security and IT Security. Follow Ray on Twitter: @RayBernardRBCS.