Understanding your whole factory with the comprehensive digital twin
Goals such as quality assurance, cost reduction, and waste mitigation have encouraged many manufacturers to begin their digital transformation journeys. These companies readily embrace technologies such as IoT and advanced robotics, with simulation being among the most prominent in the creation of smart factories. Companies can leverage technology like the digital twin to remain competitive while managing industry challenges.
The digital twin can aid both product optimization and production system augmentation. Using digital twin technology, organizations can decrease their reliance on physical prototypes, saving valuable resources. In addition, the digital twin updates in tandem with its physical counterpart, helping manufacturers respond to active elements like production lines and supply chains. Real-time simulations help identify processes that could be improved, test potential changes, and monitor entire systems.
Made up of a set of digital, physics-based models, Siemens’ unique comprehensive digital twin comprises a set of consistent digital models representing different aspects that can be used throughout the entire product and production lifecycle and the supply chain. It incorporates software across electric, mechanical, and manufacturing. The comprehensive digital twin ensures consistency throughout the product lifecycle and minimizes the effort required to create and maintain it.
The product and production twins
Leveraging the comprehensive digital twin, manufacturers can seamlessly integrate the product and production lifecycles with the Digital Twin for Products and the Digital Twin for Production. On the product side, the Digital Twin for Products’ robust simulation capabilities assist in prototyping by shortening the design cycle while simultaneously enhancing the final product’s quality.
Meanwhile, the Digital Twin for Production facilitates the design and optimization of the entire factory, making machines and production lines faster, more efficient, and eco-friendlier. It can determine the most efficient way to execute tasks in the production system, helping to optimize production scheduling.
Additionally, both facets of the digital twin help organizations reduce operational costs. Through the Digital Twins for Products and Production, manufacturers can recreate a plant virtually, allowing them to both optimize their machines and their systems before committing to expensive redesigns in the real world. Using simulation technology, companies can perform design reviews with their customers and flesh out the full capabilities of the physical systems.
Virtual ambition to tangible benefits
Businesses across industries have been seeing the advantages of the comprehensive digital twin. From product designers to machine builders, many of our customers are already generating value from implementing it. Real-world use cases include:
- Inexpensive optimization of cooling airflow
- AVG route detection
- Plant layout augmentation
- Product improvement when used in conjunction with AI
- Closed-loop digital twin creation and next-gen design optimization
Siemens’ comprehensive digital twin helps manufacturers side-step expensive and time-consuming reworks of their facilities. Employing the digital twin eliminates much of the extra time and costs accrued by shipping physical prototype machines as well as potentially expensive modifications if machines don’t meet expectations.
Towards a more collaborative future
The comprehensive digital twin has the ability to unlock a manufacturing plant’s true potential. Continued and active optimization through digital transformation and the digital twin help keep costs under control while improving product and production efficiency.
But the advantages of our digital twin do not end there. Simulation technology, along with software-defined automation and production move the industry towards creating the industrial metaverse. The industrial metaverse is a digital world that enables users to interact with virtual representations of physical assets in real-time. It will help organizations break distance barriers, stimulate collaboration, and understand problems and processes better to find the most optimal solutions.
Siemens Digital Industries Software helps organizations of all sizes digitally transform using software, hardware and services from the Siemens Xcelerator business platform. Siemens’ software and the comprehensive digital twin enable companies to optimize their design, engineering and manufacturing processes to turn today’s ideas into the sustainable products of the future. From chips to entire systems, from product to process, across all industries. Siemens Digital Industries Software – Accelerating transformation.
