Current projects

Initial situation

Digital twins have great potential for adding value both in the development and during the use of technical products. For example, the development of product service systems opens up the possibility of new services and even complete business models. Furthermore, field data can be obtained directly from the use, which is useful in the context of development through practice-oriented insights.

Both the creation and the use of digital twins are highly interdisciplinary tasks. Many companies, especially SMEs, face an hardly manageable challenge in adequately covering all the domains necessary for this. Consequently, these companies are faced with the questions of how to proceed in setting up a digital twin and what development efforts (e.g., for modeling, hardware and software) are necessary. If these questions remain unanswered, they represent a barrier and the potential of digital twins remains unused.

Project goals

The goal of the project is to develop a guideline for the development of digital twins in the context of drive technology. Aspects of physical and virtual product development are to be examined in order to do justice to the various necessary domains and subject areas. The key questions of the various domains represent the research questions, which are to be answered in the form of sub-goals.

One sub-goal is an overview of which models of the product are necessary for the creation and use of a digital twin. In order to reduce financial and development effort, it is particularly important to investigate which models already existing from product development can be adopted. Furthermore, it must be discussed which IT infrastructure and sensor technology are necessary for various use cases of digital twins. Novel sensor concepts such as sensing machine elements must also be considered. For the prediction models of the digital twin, approaches of artificial intelligence are to be investigated. The results of the sub-goals are to be translated into a blueprint for creating a digital twin parallel to the physical product in the form of step-by-step instructions coordinated in the SME environment.

Procedure

The development of a guideline for the development of digital twins as well as the necessary sub-goals is carried out in several work packages (WP) and is based on a literature research to determine the current state of the art and research. In addition to existing process models, use cases and case studies will be identified. These will be analyzed with respect to necessary models (WP2), sensor technology (WP3) and IT infrastructure (WP4), and the results will then be systematically transferred to the above-mentioned sub-goals. Based on this, future trends such as machine learning and novel sensor technology will be identified and examined for their suitability for use in the context of digital twins (AP5). Results from the individual work packages will be applied and verified using a continuous evaluation example (WP1). Finally, the results will be used to create an overall guideline for the creation of digital twins (WP6).