1. Think of digital twins
  2. The origin of digital twinning
  3. Digital twinning in industrial manufacturing

Think of digital twins

It’s the kind of thing motorists dread: a car that breaks down in the open, can’t fix it themselves, and there’s no repair shop nearby. If the car is equipped with a digital twin system that runs alongside it, showing how all parts of the vehicle are performing in real time and notifies potential breakdowns in advance for maintenance, it could reduce the number of unexpected breakdowns.

This feature, called predictive maintenance, is an important advantage of digital twinning. Digital twin refers to the “entity” in the physical space and corresponds to the “entity”. The virtual model created by digital twin technology is also called “virtual body” (equivalent to “digital twin”), which refers to the digital model of the object in the physical space in the virtual space.

The model takes data from real objects at any time through sensors, and evolves, matures and even ages along with it. Using this model, people can analyze, predict, diagnose or train physical objects, so as to optimize and make decisions. The digital model is like a twin of a real object, hence its name. From a screw to a city, everything in the physical world can have digital twins.

The origin of digital twinning

This paper mainly discusses the digital twin technology of products in manufacturing. In fact, the concept of digital twin is also proposed based on product life cycle management. From the point of view of the whole life cycle, manufacturing is divided into three stages: planning and design, production and manufacturing and operation service.

In 2003, Dr. Michael Grieves, a professor of University of Michigan, put forward the concept of “virtual digital expression equivalent to physical products” in the document of PLM course of Product life cycle Management, including physical products in physical space, virtual products in digital space and data and information process interface between them. Taking virtual products from the design stage to the full life cycle of manufacturing and operation is considered the beginning of the concept of digital twinning.

Broadly speaking, digital twinning is the technology used to create tangible physical space twinning in virtual space.

Digital twinning in industrial manufacturing

In the planning and design stage, people have used the computer to establish the physical entity model for simulation. With the development of CAD and simulation technology, the “model” is not only required to represent the entity in a more realistic and comprehensive way when it is offline, but also can reflect the state of the entity in real time when it is online, especially can predict the state of the entity in advance.

Intelligent manufacturing includes the time dimension of design, production and operation, and the application of digital twin technology is different.

(1) Design stage. Through collaborative design, people complete the design work of the product and create the design model of the product — digital twin. The manufacturability and practicability can be simulated and verified by using virtual environment, and then the production stage can be entered.

(2) Production stage. Product manufacturing is a process of virtual and real fusion. The digital twin of the physical factory operates in the virtual space of the cloud platform. At the same time, the physical equipment and IoT composed of sensors exchange data through low-delay networks such as time-sensitive network TSN\5G. The prediction data are obtained through model interaction, and the optimization control of machining process is completed in the control cycle.

(3) Operation and maintenance stage. Digital twin can not only meet the real-time monitoring of product use status, but also analyze and predict product functions and performance on the cloud platform and give early warning to problems. Can also be in the operation of training and use of guidance, with the help of virtual reality fusion technology digital twin can also provide more realistic effects.

In a word, digital twin technology has different manifestations and functions in each stage of product life cycle. In the intelligent manufacturing system based on industrial Internet, digital virtual body mainly lives in the cloud platform layer, and its control-oriented model is arranged in the edge layer to participate in real-time control.

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