We, at Tarantula, in our resolution to provide the most comprehensive IT ecosystem to towercos have partnered with various leading solution providers whose purpose-built tools integrate with Red Cube to offer an end-to-end solution in tower management.
For this month’s post, we have invited Sharon Imber, CMO at vHive, to talk about their product, the only software solution that enables enterprises to deploy autonomous drone hives to create digital twins of their assets. vHive’s software enables enterprises to digitize their field assets and operations using a single drone to multiple drones. vHive’s Digital Twin technology is driving Digital Transformation for Towercos.
What are digital twins?
A Google search of “What is a digital twin” yields more than 500,000,000 results and they’re all different. From IBM to NASA, the definition of digital twin changes based on the use case. A digital twin is not one single thing, but part of a process of digital transformation. Digital twins are not “one size fits all,” but a mix and match of technologies depending upon your organization’s needs. The goal of a digital twin is the same regardless of your industry, however: to provide a rapid, shareable, single source of truth about a physical asset.
There are new concepts and new ideas constantly entering the digital twin ecosystem, and the definition of a digital twin is constantly evolving. As we move forward, data capture continues to improve, addressing more complex cases and a wider variety of assets with more ease. AI and machine learning continue to advance and will be trained to detect more characteristics of an asset, contributing more to the insights that users get from digital twins. We will continuously see the demand for additional items to be detected to contribute to the insights that you get about a site.
The entire ecosystem of digitization technology is rapidly developing throughout the business world to create greater scope and potential for digital twins across global organizations. In the telecom industry, the stakeholders, whether an MNO or a towerco located anywhere in the world can use the vHive Digital Twin software, examine a site asset closely regardless of the type of asset, interact with it, and take the information and insights that they need from it to optimize the asset value.
Digital twin model
Image source: vHive’s database
Digital twins and towercos
Digital twins also bring value to multiple users across the organization. For example, operations teams can ensure cost efficiencies and site utilization, sales teams can identify new revenue opportunities and support customer activities, M&A teams can receive rapid audits insights resulting in better information influencing better negotiation prices, Leasing teams can validate accurate inventory and the management receives dashboards based on one source of truth for all their assets portfolio. Some of the towerco use cases of using vHive’s solution are:
- Inventory verification and synchronization
- Tower QA inspection for faults and maintenance
- Compliance & audits
- M&A audits
- Work/construction acceptance
- New (5G) site acquisition and approval
From data to insights with the vHive solution
To ensure the quality of the digital twins, vHive’s solution ensures that the process of data acquisition is consistent and methodical throughout. Using vHive’s autonomous data capture, the quality of data acquired is not operator-dependent: it is assured by the system. The optimal number of images is collected to create an accurate digital twin. Proper upload of the data is also handled by the system, and vHive ensures that data is properly associated with the capture plan dataset, preventing erroneous uploads of data. The automated data processing generates photo-realistic site reality models with no human involvement. vHive then applies AI and Computer Vision algorithms to generate powerful analytics and digital twin insights. In addition to the data that is collected and simulated, the subsequent insights generated by the vHive software are also shared with the towercos and MNOs to help them make more efficient decisions about their infrastructure and assets.
The step-by-step process from data collection to report generation
Image source: vHive’s database
Another step forward in digital transformation
With vHive, users can visit the sites virtually. vHive’s philosophy is to provide intuitive, easy to work, yet powerful visual interfaces, enabling the benefits of data and data analytics throughout the organization. The users can access the site data, from remote locations, and with a click of a button, they can collaborate and share insights.
vHive’s 3D CAD simulation environment adds another digital twin layer, in which site components can be repositioned, removed, or added. This allows users to visualize different configurations of the tower, running “what if” scenarios like removing panels, adding equipment, or editing information. Having a visual interface that enables the comparison of “as-built” to “as planned” streamlines your process and makes it more effective.
Understanding assets better through digital twins
To summarize, digital twins represent a digital transformation. With imagery, analytics, simulation, and intelligence, digital twins can provide value throughout an organization – and as digital twins evolve, that value continues to increase. Digital twins provide a deep understanding of physical assets, and that understanding can be leveraged to have a significant impact on workflows, efficiency, and profitability across the enterprise.