Digital twins: creating new innovation opportunities
Digital twins – doubling the potential for innovation
Minimising failure rates, shortening development cycles and ensuring your products can be built – the technology behind digital twins can do it all for your business.
Many businesses are already well accustomed to using digital models for example in manufacturing. CAD (computer-aided design) helps in the development of products, while design reviews allow you to comprehensively and systematically examine designs to ensure they meet all your requirements.
Both applications allow you to test systems, equipment and products long before manufacturing begins. But digital twins come into play when products are being used. They are virtual representations of products or systems and they enable you to run through steps in production and the associated supply chains in digital processes.
Through the IoT we know that the benefit of linking the real to the digital world like this is obvious: customised investigations and tests can be done without too much financial input, resources or manpower. Prototypes don’t need to be made and you no longer need to spend lots of time identifying faults after commissioning. The software solutions you need can simply be purchased from the Cloud and professional service providers can implement them.
Four different digital twins that enterprises can use
When digital twins replicate reality in the virtual space, they depict vast quantities of data and information at an appropriate granularity, so it makes sense to subdivide them. There are different types:
The digital product twin is used in product development. It allows you to commission a product virtually before manufacturing begins. The data collected during this simulated operation helps improve every aspect of the product. This involves 3D / CAD models, testing properties and the simulations required during product development.
The digital factory twin is used when planning factories, machines, systems, tools and testing programs. This kind of digital twin supports, monitors and optimises production processes.
The digital service twin is a product’s digitalised memory. It involves production figures and information about processing times, adherence to stipulated delivery times and product quality.
The digital twin of organisation facilitates optimised, comprehensive planning of all of the processes in a business, and increases data security and data protection.
The potential areas in which the multiple capabilities of a digital twin can be used depend on the stage of the product life cycle which it represents. The simplest and most widespread type is the digital product twin. It is deployed at the very beginning of data acquisition and supplies results that form the basis for subsequent applications.
According to a Gartner Survey , around 13 percent of 600 businesses that were polled in six countries (including Germany) currently use digital twins. The vast majority of these enterprises (88 percent) use digital twins for simulation purposes.
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Which businesses use this technology?
Italian sports car manufacturer Maserati uses digital twins to almost halve the time it takes to develop its vehicles.
Aircraft manufacturer Airbus uses digital twins to coordinate the 12,000 partners who supply the three million individual components of the A319.
The Siemens factory in Amberg, which is known as a smart factory, has also set high standards in this technology. The positive experience it collected using its own applications led the company to set up a new operating company which now offers industrial businesses the same technology.
Developers at Daimler use a virtual engine block to simulate the way different parts of the engine behave at different speeds.
Ports like Rotterdam and Hamburg already have digital twins, although they only replicate the aspects relevant to operations, and not the entirety of port facilities.
