DIGITAL TWIN: A NECESSITY IN FUTURE MANUFACTURING
In today’s world, the specifications for manufactured products are getting more and more complex with each passing day. To meet these specifications for the final product, the set of traditional tools the engineers are able to use is rather small. Needed is a set of construction and manufacturing tools to meet the demanded standard of a digital world with software driven products. To meet these standards traditionally, a high effort in the construction and manufacturing phase was needed with no guarantee that the final product fits the standards.
The technology of digital twin offers engineers a „look through the microscope” in the very hearts of their products. They can show what happens the very moment as well as what happens in the future lifetime of the product and its physical assets.
In existing literature definitions about what characterizes a digital twin are „Using a digital copy of the physical system to perform real-time optimization” as well as „The digital twin is the virtual representation of a physical object or system across its life-cycle. It uses real-time data and other sources to enable learning, reasoning and dynamically recalibrating for improved decision making.” In simple words these definitions access that the digital twin creates an extremely complex virtual model which is supposed to be the exact counterpart (twin) of a physical constructed product.