The News: A cloud-based digital twin aimed at helping customers thoroughly test process engineering changes before they go into production was debuted this week by Honeywell, giving customers a new tool for safely tracking, managing, and testing process control changes and system modifications before they go live. The new Honeywell Digital Prime service will allow users to perform testing on process changes more frequently via a digital twin, which will reduce any code glitches from getting into live production systems. Honeywell Digital Prime was announced June 19 at the Honeywell User Group (HUG) Performance Materials and Technologies “Optimizing Transformation” conference in Orlando. Read the Press Release about Honeywell Digital Prime on the company’s Performance Materials and Technologies website.

Honeywell Unveils Cloud-Based Digital Twin for Testing

Analyst Take: A cloud-based digital twin for enterprise process engineering testing? Wow, what an outside-the-box way of bringing laudable improvements to code writing and development. Not only is this approach creative and fresh, but it is being brought to the market by Honeywell in response to customer requests for new ways to do their process engineering code testing more easily. And to me, any time a company listens to its customers and implements changes or products that help solve customer problems and concerns, that is a good thing.

Until now, performing process engineering testing on new changes or code meant running it on non-production hardware or in the cloud, both of which require capital investments for access. And mistakes could happen where an engineer could accidentally unleash unfinished changes into production, which can be a nightmare that no customer wants to endure.

With those issues in mind, Honeywell created its Honeywell Digital Prime offering, which allows customers to have their control system in an environment that is air-gapped and separate from their production environment, ensuring a safe development environment that is not connected to production systems until they are ready.

At the HUG conference, Tiffany Barnes, a technical solution consultant and former project engineer in Honeywell’s Process Solutions unit, said that Honeywell Digital Prime is designed to improve security and reliability for customers as they perform their process engineering tasks. With Digital Prime, she said, those changes can be performed in a low-risk space because it is not tied to production. That means that process engineers – even novice engineers who are just learning the systems – can use it to make changes knowing that their actions are separated from the production operating environment. This allows creativity without fear of throwing the whole system into chaos due to mistakes that lead to coding errors in live production systems.

The Honeywell Digital Prime ecosystem will arrive later this year with control system digital twin and control simulation features, and will later be expanded with additional capabilities, including collaboration, a digital marketplace, actionable insights, and data synchronization, according to Honeywell.

It seems so simple, but sometimes the simplest ideas can make the most sense and are too often overlooked. This is why I am bullish on the new Honeywell Digital Prime offering, which I believe will give enterprise customers beneficial new options and safety nets in their process engineering workflows.

Benefits of a Cloud-Based Digital Twin

Honeywell Digital Prime is designed to allow enterprises to track, manage, and test their process control changes and system modifications on the fly in an air-gapped system that replicates their current live production systems in every way. That use of a replica of the existing system is a huge benefit because it gives process engineers a picture of everything that is in place so they can make improvements and changes without fear of causing new and unexpected problems in the production environment.

This capability is important because changes can always cause issues with unrelated code that may not have been anticipated. Those “gotchas” are the issues that even the most experienced engineers and developers cannot always prevent, but if the changes are introduced in Honeywell Digital Prime, they cannot impact critical production systems if there is a problem.

Honeywell Digital Prime includes capabilities that allow process engineers to manage changes, run factory acceptance tests, and improve project execution and training, all outside mission critical production systems. Honeywell Digital Prime can also be used to test modifications during planned shutdown periods in operations, helping to make that downtime more productive.

Digital Prime was designed as a collaborative ecosystem that includes secure cloud-based connectivity, a virtual engineering platform, multi-factor authentication, and integrated security protections, all which can be accessed by users anywhere around the world.

Honeywell Digital Prime will be available to customers starting in Q4 of 2023 as a subscription service.

Cloud-Based Digital Twin Overview

Honeywell Digital Prime is just the sort of innovation I have come to expect from Honeywell. And as with many other good ideas, it resulted from listening directly to customers as they described their most challenging bottlenecks and problems in maintaining their current process engineering systems and workflows.

By using this collaborative Honeywell Digital Prime offering, customers will be able to keep their production and development environments distinct from each other, increasing security, creativity, reliability, and confidence across the board.

I am a big believer in the digital twin concept across IT and I am bullish on its promise, capabilities, and its creativity in solving difficult challenges for enterprises of all types. I believe it will be fascinating to watch how digital twins continue to find new uses in enterprise IT across the marketplace.

Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.

Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.