Digital Twins
How digital twins maintain identity, state, and relationships
Sherivs · Editorial · Published 2026-10-26
A twin that is only a 3D model is decoration. A useful twin remembers state, relationships, and events, then computes when those events occur.
A digital twin is often sold as a picture of a building or a device. Pictures do not decide who may change a record, and they do not remember what happened last Tuesday.
For an institution, a twin has to be a durable object: identity, current state, relationships to people and other twins, and a history of events. Compute should run when those events happen, or on a schedule the organization authorized — not as a permanently spinning worker for every object.
Honesty about availability
Sherivs treats twins as part of the long-term architecture. Administrative surfaces exist. A complete twin runtime, including device and IoT twins, is not claimed as a generally available product in the current execution profile.