PROSTEP has published a white paper covering a number of important aspects to consider when implementing a Digital Twin. These include what information should be included in these twins, how they can be structured, and what role cloud and platforms play for Digital Twin applications. The white paper underlines the importance of digital consistency.

For some years now, digitalization has been the central future topic for German industry. The manufacturing industry in particular is shaping the digital future of production with many initiatives, often inspired by the Industry 4.0 future project launched by the German government in 2012. Industry 4.0 is the manufacturing-focused variant of the digital transformation process that needs to be successfully shaped for society as a whole. In particular, the digital future of production goods that were previously completely dominated by mechanics is generating constant pressure to innovate.

It is not only in the automotive industry that future business success will depend to a large extent on new, innovative business models. These need to be met by adapting product development and production accordingly, and by providing good support for digital usage concepts. The Digital Twin is one of the central innovations that enables companies to successfully shape this digital transformation.

The forms of the Digital Twin are as different as the various products that the manufacturing industry produces. As different as the business models on the market are, as diverse are the information required in the Digital Twin. For many Digital Twin concepts, it is very important to combine production information with information from the current use of the product. In the best case scenario, the service technician of the elevator optimized by predictive maintenance mechanisms is already provided with the parts list of the parts actually installed in this elevator instance in the service center.

But product development also wants to participate in the Digital Twin. Unusual accumulations of faults in certain components are to be eliminated quickly during the further development of the product. Skilful use of this feedback has the potential to directly improve product quality and to reduce service costs, which are particularly relevant for manufacturers with “as a service” concepts, more quickly.

In order to fully exploit the potential of the Digital Twin, a digital end-to-end process chain must be created that provides the right information in the Digital Twin reliably, quickly and automatically.

A particular challenge for the Digital Twin is that the required data must come from a wide variety of sources. During the usage phase, the status data is ideally available via an IoT solution. However, production data relating to the specific product instance may also be required. Ideally, one would also like to be able to access information from product development. These areas are characterized by a multitude of information systems and are themselves under strong pressure to change, which is characterized by the topics Systems Engineering, Industry 4.0 and Industrial IoT.

With regard to the Digital Twin, decision-makers in companies are faced with the question of how to make it successful in a highly complex infrastructure. Closely related to this are further topics such as the question of what effects the emerging platform structures will have on this process, how to find the appropriate cloud strategy, which are the most important skills for designing a continuous process chain spanning several independent and individual platforms and which architecture concepts are necessary for this.

Since its foundation 25 years ago, PROSTEP AG has been designing and implementing digital end-to-end processes in product development. On the basis of the experience gained, we have compiled a number of topics in a white paper that are intended to help companies move from their status quo to a sustainable design of their process and IT landscape and to master the diverse challenges of the Digital Twin. The white paper is available for download here.