How digital data influences logistics

Tracking, tracing and digital twins: Who gets custody?

Are you still on Facebook? If you have a profile there — or on Xing, Myspace or ElitePartner — you have a digital twin. It allows others to learn about you without seeing you in person or ever having met you. Are you familiar with your engine warning light? If it flashes and you take your car to a garage, the mechanic reads the onboard computer. In other words, they examine your car’s digital twin.

Take a moment to think about what else has a digital twin. The ventilator in an intensive care unit? The delivery driver and the pizza you ordered? What does not have a digital twin? Very little, but most twins are still in their infancy. A fully developed digital twin is rare. A rough picture of the situation and its obstacles looks like this:

• Facebook profile: Manual input, a relatively flexible data structure, and a large dataset — even my profile, unused for years, is 415 MB in size.
• Car onboard computer: No continuous data communication and a geographically limited set of data recipients.
• Ventilator: Access restrictions due to personal data protection.
• Delivery driver → GPS tracking: The GPS tracker’s battery needs regular charging.

Taken individually, these obstacles are clearly not major problems. The digital twins described above exist for purposes such as creative self-presentation, optimising maintenance and, more broadly, production, and preventing faults. And tracking the precise location of your pizza can sometimes be more exciting than Netflix. Form follows function, and a digital twin is as good as it needs to be.

The fundamental digital question

Now suppose that requirements grow without limit and the ideal digital twin exists: an entity that automatically and continuously transmits structurally optimised data and has the energy resources needed to do so. We could successfully overcome issues such as data protection, storage, sensor technology and transmission, creating a fully developed communication tool between people and, for example, aircraft turbines, wind turbines or refrigerators. This vision of the future is digital. Everything communicates. Now for the million-euro question:

Who controls the data?

Or, to make it more concrete in logistics: who may read the status of an AGV? Still, the AGV manufacturer; Dematic, the general contractor; SAP, the digital infrastructure provider; or BASF, the customer? In a future where everything in and around us transmits data, yet data is astronomically valuable and therefore almost nobody is allowed access, the first significant open-source provider will be either the big loser, a revolutionary, or — as almost always — both.