Digital Twins Land a Role in Product Design

The points of view of thought leaders from Siemens PLM Software were included in a December 2015 article in Desktop Engineering, by Contributing Editor Beth Stackpole, titled, “Digital Twins Land a Role in Product Design.”

In the story, the writer said that the practice of digital prototyping is evolving with the digital twin – a concept that carries the traditional 3D representation of a product into the new reality of a converged physical and virtual world.Siemens’ Zvi Feuer and Aaron Frankel had the opportunity to talk about why they think the digital twin is important.  Here’s what they said:

Siemens PLM Software sees the concept of the digital twin as the intersection of four different worlds coming together: Product design, manufacturing planning, factory design and the real world — with an emphasis on production. “The digital twin does something very unique by merging the virtual and real worlds of production,” says Aaron Frankel, senior director of product marketing for Siemens PLM Software. “Now you can take the as-designed model and all the information you are collecting from the production environment about performance and quality, overlay them on a digital model, and compare the as-designed and as-built worlds to see if there is a difference,” he says.

This view advances the concept of digital prototyping by taking into account all that can happen with production processes, full proofing a product design by eliminating the possibility of failure, according to Zvi Feuer, Siemens PLM’s vice president of Manufacturing Engineering Software. “The digital twin is the avatar of the product process and the factory all together,” he says. “If you can take failure off the table, companies will be willing to be bolder and take bigger risks.”

The underpinning of Siemens’ digital twin concept is the Teamcenter data management and collaboration platform along with various other components, some from its simulation and factory optimization tools and others from its Manufacturing Execution System (MES) and factory automation suite.

Read the entire story, “Digital Twins Land a Role in Product Design”