Digital Twins

As the term may suggest, digital twins are digital images of physical objects, such as industrial equipment and machines, vehicles, but also buildings and medical patients. The identical copy, called digital twin or digital twin model, offers a variety of opportunities in industrial applications that are advantageous for companies because they save enormous resources.

By using a digital twin concept, production processes can be optimized and problems such as autonomous driving detected and solved using existing data before they arise in physical reality at all.

In Industry 4.0, which strives for higher automation and data exchange in manufacturing, the digital twin infrastructure offers many advantages. They are used for preventive maintenance of machines and for process optimization where data from devices are analyzed. This can be used to determine when the next maintenance should be performed.

Through the digitization of the production line data are collected from all aspects of production, which enables monitoring of the production line.

In addition, a digital twin software can gather relevant information in real time to improve final manufacturing processes. Specific applications include, for example, the avoidance of machine failure during peak production times, or applications of autonomous driving.

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For interested companies, the first step is primarily to decide which aspects of the underlying device should be modeled for the planned use. This can be done either manually or programmatically, depending on the complexity of the model and the preferences of the team. Once this decision has been made, the infrastructure can be planned in the second step. Only then is it possible to write the code that interacts with the AAS and uses the collected data to then be used advantageously in production. Fraunhofer IKS can help with all these steps and support the creation and use of digital twins for the best possible results.