"Enhance Manufacturing Competitiveness" SKT Launches Digital Twin Alliance

[Asia Economy Reporter Seulgina Cho] SK Telecom announced on the 28th that it will launch the ‘Digital Twin Alliance’ aimed at releasing a ‘subscription-based digital twin service’ to help strengthen the competitiveness of domestic mid-sized and small manufacturing companies and enhance worker safety.

Digital Twin is an important technology that applies identical data to conduct various simulations that need to be executed in reality within a virtual space for decision-making purposes. It has been selected as one of the digital ultra-innovation project tasks under Korea’s New Deal 2.0, and is rapidly spreading mainly in the manufacturing sector. However, mid-sized and small companies face difficulties in adopting it due to the enormous initial costs required.

On this day, SK Telecom launched the Digital Twin Alliance and signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) for business cooperation with 20 companies and organizations equipped with advanced ICT capabilities, including Dassault Syst?mes, Schneider Electric, AWS (Amazon Web Services), SK Planet, Fluxity, Wizcore, Vernect, Korea Electronics Technology Institute, and Korea Intelligent IoT Association, to launch the subscription-based digital twin service.

The alliance plans to provide solutions to various problems in manufacturing sites through virtualization and monitoring of factory equipment and safety facilities, collection and simulation analysis of process·safety data, and optimization of operating environments by launching subscription-based services. In addition, it will develop factory safety services that manufacturers can apply in a short period and manufacturing-specialized services for various industries based on the know-how of alliance member companies.

Furthermore, SK Telecom will apply world-class 5G, LTE Cat. M1 (an IoT-dedicated network), cloud, artificial intelligence (AI), and 5G mobile edge computing (MEC) to the digital twin service to provide the best enterprise IT service operating environment. It will also support alliance members in pioneering the enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS) market and expanding globally.

SK Telecom and alliance partners expect that with the service launch, mid-sized and small companies will be able to easily adopt digital twins through subscriptions, thereby improving productivity and worker safety and achieving enhanced competitiveness.

Meanwhile, SK Telecom and some partners have already secured basic operational know-how of digital twin business by participating in the ‘5G-based Digital Twin Public Leading Project’ promoted by the Ministry of Science and ICT since last year.

In this project, SK Telecom and partners developed and showcased 18 manufacturing sector services such as ▲production readiness verification ▲production quality analysis ▲production virtualization monitoring for material, parts, and equipment manufacturers, and 13 safety sector services such as ▲safety risk monitoring ▲power usage prediction ▲safety patrol robots. They also implemented an integrated control center that participating companies can directly manage as a digital twin.

Shin Yong-sik, Head of SK Telecom IoT CO, said, “Through the alliance created with the best domestic and international partners, we can jointly promote digital twin, a core technology of the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” adding, “We will help strengthen the competitiveness of small and medium enterprises through subscription-based digital twin services and take the lead in practicing ESG management.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.