A digital twin that keeps its sources

01Field scene

A transmission corridor as an asset.

Five pylons on real terrain, the conductors between them, a substation and a weather station. The twin knows each span length from the geometry and each sag from the conductors’ temperature, which the weather station helps to estimate. Substation data follows its own standard model².

Figure as text: A transmission corridor over real terrain

Five lattice pylons across a valley from elevation data, a substation, an edge node and a weather station.

• Pylon
• Substation
• Weather
• Edge

02Layer stack

The twin as registered layers.

Under the geometry sit the layers that make it a twin rather than a drawing: terrain, imagery, infrastructure, live stations and a model output. Open models such as CityGML give buildings and networks shared semantics³; information management for built assets is itself standardised⁴.

Figure as text: Layers of a site twin

An exploded stack of terrain, imagery, land cover, infrastructure, sensors, analysis grid and model.

1. Terrain
2. Imagery
3. Vegetation: Vegetation near conductors.
4. Assets: Pylons, spans and the substation.
5. Sensors
6. Clearance model: Modelled clearance; the red line marks the limit.

03Systems diagram

Keeping the twin in step.

Phasor measurement units report voltage and current with precise timestamps⁵; weather and line sensors report through the edge; surveys arrive months apart. The twin synchronises each at its own cadence and keeps the source of every value. Cut a source to see which parts of the twin go stale.

Figure as text: Sources that keep a site twin current

A four-tier diagram: field sources, the edge, the twin, and its users.

• Sources: Phasor unit, Weather, Line sensor, Survey
• Edge: Substation edge, Upload
• Twin: Twin
• Users: Operations, Planning

8 links. Scenarios: All sources current; Substation edge offline.

04Timeline to 2030

The standards beneath a twin.

A twin built on open models can outlive the software that made it. The milestones below fix its geometry, its semantics and its information management.

Figure as text: Standards for digital twins of sites and assets

A timeline from 2011 to 2030 with synchrophasor, substation, BIM, manufacturing twin and CityGML standards.

1. 2011 Synchrophasor measurement standard (IEEE C37.118.1). Time-stamped phasor measurements for power systems.⁵
2. 2013 Substation communication and object models (IEC 61850). Data models and services for power utility automation.²
3. 2018-12 Information management with BIM (ISO 19650-1). Concepts and principles for built-asset information.⁴
4. 2021-09 CityGML 3.0 conceptual model (OGC CityGML 3.0). Semantic city and infrastructure models, including dynamic data.³
5. 2021-10 Digital twin framework for manufacturing (ISO 23247-1). Principles for observable manufacturing elements and their twins.¹