Digital triplets offer limitless opportunities to increase trusted outcomes

CGI’s digital triplet approach extends the digital twin model by applying AI-driven analysis to increase the usability and interpretability of the insights. By synthesizing data quickly and communicating outcomes clearly, digital triplets help organizations enhance decision-making. 

AI developer using Artificial Intelligence software on a computer

Through advanced AI capabilities and human-AI interaction, the digital triplet serves as a third-party advisor to the digital twin end user, such as decision-makers in a health system, manufacturer, utility, or other enterprise.

This capability enables organizations to vary scenarios, ask validating or alternative criteria questions, and explore options in partnership with AI using real-time natural language through text, voice or both. This innovative approach enables more personalized, evidence-based, and transparent decision-making and recommendations to create more business opportunities and reduce risks. This solution also increases the value and return on investment for digital twin capabilities.

How our digital triplet works

The digital triplet is CGI’s solution to providing more insight to decision-makers through an agent that can interrogate and explore the digital twin. By adding generative AI and explainable AI to digital twin solutions, organizations can use natural language to explore the insights, gain in-context recommendations, and investigate alternate scenarios in real time.

Our digital triplet approach consists of three components:

  • The physical entity
  • The digital twin
  • Agentic AI-based intelligence using both generative AI (GenAI) and explainable AI (XAI).
digital triplet circular diagram
  1. The physical entity can be a person, physical asset, or a physical architecture (building or complex integrated system such as a utility grid). The physical entity is the subject that is assessed, monitored, and evaluated (the “as-is”) to improve functioning and/or outcomes.
  2. The digital twin models the physical entity’s state and dynamics using data-driven and knowledge-based methods.  It is a virtual representation (the digital representation of the “as-is”) of the physical entity that can be monitored and evaluated. It may include a single system or a full virtual blueprint of all systems and interactions. In the case of a physical asset, a digital twin includes the asset’s technical specifications and operational history. It processes real-time data collected from edge devices and operations, as well as from diagnostic tests or monitoring devices attached to the physical entity. In addition to complex monitoring, the digital twin can incorporate causal inference techniques to identify cause and effect relationships among variables and the potential effects of interventions (the digital “could-be”). 
  3. The digital triplet: Intelligent advisor that allows the user to interrogate the digital twin. This functionality is provided through three AI technologies: GenAI to generate scenarios, XAI to communicate GenAI results to a human expert in an understandable way, and a multi-agent ecosystem to seamlessly enable secure, reliable, and robust AI output.
  • Generative AI (GenAI) uses information provided by a digital twin to help interpret the data and explore additional and more complex hypothetical scenarios through a scenario generator. Its methods may include reinforcement learning, simulation, or optimization to generate and evaluate scenarios according to different objectives and constraints, such as maximizing efficacy, minimizing side effects, visualizing unintended impacts, reducing costs, or aligning with policy guidelines and organizational policies and preferences. The digital triplet can also use extended capabilities to generate realistic and high-quality images of assets or ecosystems in addition to text responses.
  • Explainable AI (XAI) communicates the results of GenAI scenario generation to a human expert in a transparent and understandable way. It uses natural language (text or speech), visualization, or interactive dialogue to present scenarios, highlight differences and similarities, justify recommendations, and answer questions from the human expert. Pairing this ability with routing capabilities and mobile device data, such as location, moves solutions from monitoring of stationary screens, to provide actionable insights directly to the most appropriate individuals. Explainable AI can also elicit feedback from the expert and use it to refine the scenarios or generate new ones. 
  • Multi-agent ‘worker bees' are seamless to the users that interact with the solution through speech or text, but provide a powerful approach to ensuring the accuracy, trustworthiness and reliability of the delivered information. These agents help complete all of the tasks required to retrieve, generate, synthesize and validate information across discrete and narrative data, documents and images. By treating the foundation model agents as services, CGI can match the right agent to the use case or user need and configure a digital triplet that enhances existing investments in data and infrastructure.

Key benefits: proactive communication to turn insights into action

By considering multiple factors and outcomes, examining different options, and explaining reasons and trade-offs, digital triplets:

  • Deliver customized, evidence-based, and proactive advice. 
  • Significantly boost the capabilities of human experts by increasing their knowledge, independence, and creativity. 
  • Facilitate synergistic collaboration between humans and AI, driving responsible use and trusted outcomes. 
  • Enable industry experts to create new hypotheses, test new interventions, and discover new insights from data and models, increasing the value of their digital twin investments.
  • Increase the value and ROI of digital twin investments and implementations.
     
Generative AI’s true value lies in digital twins and trusted data

Explore these industry use cases

Healthcare

Digital triplets can help personalize preventative medicine, diagnostics and treatment protocols. For diagnostics, the digital triplet can help improve the accuracy and speed of diagnosis by integrating and analyzing multiple sources of data. For treatment protocols, the digital triplet can present the scenarios to the healthcare provider and the patient, explain the pros and cons of each option, and recommend the best treatment. For Cancer Care the digital triplet can help tailor the treatment to the specific molecular profile and dynamics of the tumor. 

Manufacturing

Digital triplets enhance manufacturing operations, improve decision-making, shorten time to action and optimize factory processes. They bridge the gap between the physical world and allow decision-makers to further explore the virtual representation, leading to more efficient and resilient factories. Some examples include layout design validation, production bottleneck, prediction, process automation, real-time decision making, such as to assist in production scheduling and resource allocation and faster response to real-time events.

Utilities

The digital triplet can support infrastructure optimization and assessment. By creating a digital triplet of their entire infrastructure, they can simulate various scenarios such as network expansion, asset health monitoring, asset investigation/repair interventions, grid resilience, load forecasting, energy storage integration, renewable energy integration, demand response programs, cybersecurity preparedness, regulatory compliance, emergency preparedness and customer engagement.

 

ESG Metrics 

Digital triplets offer business potential by predicting the future instead of analyzing the past. For instance, a manufacturing company can use a digital triplet to track and better explore real-time energy consumption, waste production, and carbon emissions. By monitoring and validating scenario options on Environmental, Social & Governance (ESG) metrics, organizations can make informed decisions and improve their ESG performance.

Transportation

The digital triplet can support real-time safety protocols to operators by ingesting real-time scenarios and providing feedback regarding various actions and protocols as well as the next best action as a situation evolves with equipment malfunction or schedule route detours or delays. In transportation the digital triplet can provide more in-context information on route optimization and estimated time of arrivals in shipping and receiving – allowing the planning teams to better adjust dependencies and communicate across a supply chain.

Property Management

Digital triplets can support property and building management by helping to action sensor data, whether that be in making energy-saving decisions tied to historical usage or predicted usage during a forecasted weather event or planned activity. Application of digital triplets to in-dwelling sensor monitoring can enable support for and by the residents with directed, proactive messages. Residents can quickly take actions such as ventilating a damp space before mold proliferates or investigating a suspected leak before a maintenance team would be able to gain access to the site. In this way digital triplets can not only improve resolution, but also prevent costly or dangerous outcomes.