The collaboration was announced this week during the SAS Innovate conference in Orlando, with SAS CTO Bryan Harris posing the question, "what if ... you need to ask 'what if'?"

SAS is well-known for its rigurous and robust mathematical and statistical analytical engine that helps companies around the world unlock the hidden insights within their massive troves of data. However, Harris asked, what if you need to understand situations that haven't happened yet? What if you want to explore how your processes improve - or are hindered - by adjusting various touchpoints. For instance, adding an extra machine here, changing a route there, or ensuring you protect the health of an unpredictable human operator?

This is the premise of digital twins, "building simulated environments for being seen, understood, and optimised," he said. And, "it's about time digital twins look like the world they simulate."

Many digital twins around the world have a 2D representation. Or are represented purely by cells on a spreadsheet. Imagine a digital twin of your warehouse or process plant that you can quite literally walk through.

In comes Epic Games. iTWire regularly reports on industry collaborations - Microsoft, AWS, Google, Oracle, Nvidia, AMD, and the other usual suspects are routinely in the news for their joint engagements between themselves and others. Meanwhile, Epic Games hits the news for announcing new seasons in its hit game Fortnite, or because of its fight to unlock third-party marketplaces for mobile apps.

A joint venture between SAS - a serious business tool for identifying risk, preventing fraud, revealing market trends - and Epic Games - a game engine that lets players roam around open-world environments - was the last thing iTWire imagined. Yet, SAS showed it on stage alongside packaged goods manufacturer Georgia-Pacific who create, among other things, paper towels, cups, and corrugated cardboard.

Like iTWire, you may not have imagined such a collaboration, but once explained it makes incredible sense.

Modern video games demand quality decision making, and Epic Games delivers real-time dynamic environments with photorealistic graphics and advanced physics simulation.

In fact, Epic Games already works with a range of industries such as fashion, film, and live events. "Whenever you see a car on a mountain in an ad, chances are it's rendered in the Unreal Engine," said Epic Games VP and GM for the Unreal Engine Bill Clifford.

"Unreal Engine is the crown jewel of Epic," Clifford said. "It's used not only for gaming; one of the most valuable uses we see is to simulate real world concepts."

For Georgia-Pacific the use of digital twins has large potential impact. "We can use the capabilities to optimise our autonomous guided vehicles, and to make our facilities safer," said Georgia-Pacific VP of AI Roshan Shah. The company has over 30,000 employees across more than 150 locations globally.

The autonomous guided vehicle, or AGV, that Shah refers to is a robotic forklift that travels around the paper mill moving items from here to there. Put too few AGVs into production and production slows; put too many in and you waste money and AGVs potentially collide with each other as well as human plant operators trying to traverse the factory floor. The Savannah River Mill site where the SAS and Epic Games collaboration was tested in is over 400m long "or four football fields," he said.

Shah wondered how to enhance the AGV routing strategies, avoid unforseen obstacles, and calculate just how many AGVs the business needed. "Solving these three things is a big thing for us," he said.

A digital twin was needed; instead of deploying more and more AGVs into the real world - and having the humans run around them to see if they get hurt - a digital twin allows for testing and visualisation without anywhere near the cost or safety risk of doing it for real.

"The paper mill was rendered in Unreal Engine using Epic's RealityScan app to capture it and bring it to life in true-to-life form with dynamic lighting and shadows," Clifford said.

The SAS team built a custom plugin for the Unreal Engine to unlock telemetry across all the physics as AGVs and people were dropped into it and moved around. This data was fed into SAS Viya, running simulations over the data, which in turn fed data back into the Unreal Engine and a facility editor. Crunching the numbers identified different routes and schedules that offered the best optimisation.

Using SAS Viya helped Georgia-Pacific figure out the right number of AGVs it needed, which turned out to be 47 for this particular facility. That translates to real numbers through efficient operations without wasteful spending.

Additionally, adding digital humans into the mix and simulating different lighting conditions, different human body size and activities and the like, further helped the team evaluate the factory layout and avoid injuries to real people.

"The ability to use the gaming engine helped us use models to train data with proper representation," Shah said. "I believe this is the future of manufacturing."

"We see massive opportunity for aerospace, robotics, autonomous driving - wherever AI is involved, there's a role for Epic Games to play," Clifford said.

Another potential industry is healthcare, Harris said, allowing simulations over staff scheduling, equipment maintenance, and patient workflows. Another is optimising smart cities.

“With the help of SAS and Unreal Engine, we can create realistic simulations of factory operations. Imagine watching AGVs navigate through a bustling factory floor, reacting to proximity alerts, obstacles and rare adverse events in real time," Shah said. “The powerful analysis and photorealistic simulations delivered by SAS’ enhanced digital twins can enable decision making and boost output at Savannah River Mill. And they hold great promise for improving productivity, safety and efficiency at other Georgia-Pacific facilities.”

“With SAS’ advanced analytics and Unreal Engine, Georgia-Pacific created an amazing example for how a digital twin can create real-world value for businesses,” Clifford said. “SAS is opening the door for manufacturers to bring complex data and automated systems to life through 3D visuals. This will make high-fidelity, interactive digital twins more accessible so manufacturers can upgrade their operations, gain better real-time insights and save money.”

“As manufacturers hire the next generation of workers, they need to make the use of data and AI more engaging and appealing,” Harris said. “Gaming technology – for a generation that grew up playing video games – is one important way to transform business decision making from charts and spreadsheets to immersive experiences with amazing visual fidelity. Gamifying business processes and tasks can make them less repetitive and more engaging, boosting productivity and bottom-line results.”

The enhanced digital twins offered by SAS and tapping Unreal Engine make advanced analytics more accessible to a wider group of people with varying job roles and experience. In addition to data scientists and quantitative experts, frontline workers, machine operators and engineers can now more easily use data and AI.