Digital Twins

Useful piece on Digital Twins and their definition and use.   Adds to my current examination and use cases.

The Multiple Faces of Digital Twins   By Alex Woodie  in Datanami

Digital twins are emerging as a hot technology, particularly among manufacturers and companies involved with the Industrial Internet of Things. Depending on the use cases, though, customers may opt for one type of digital twin over another.

To a certain extent, every digital twin is a unique creation. The ability to create a digitized copy of an actual physical asset, such as a wind turbine or a locomotive, and measure how that model responds and reacts to different inputs is the fundamental breakthrough that is driving adoption of digital twin technologies.

But there are a few broad categories of digital twins, and companies that are considering adopting a digital twin would do well to explore how their use cases match up to these types.

According to Philipp Wallner, the industry manager for MathWorks, there are two general types of digital twins: physics-based twins and data-based twins.

The physics-based digital twin is a detailed reproduction of a well-understood piece of machinery that behaves in a predictable manner, such as a robot or a piece of equipment on a manufacturing line. In some cases, these physics-based digital twins are created by importing CAD files into a simulation platform.

Data-based twins, on the other hand, are models that machineries or processes that are not as well understood and have very complex interactions, such as a compressor. While the physics driving these machines are generally understood, the high number of variables involved, including the shapes of vessels, precludes basing the model directly on physics. However, users do have a large amount of data describing the machine’s behavior, which becomes the basis for the model.

MathWorks helps its customers build both types of digital twins. One of its customers, Krones, developed a digital twin in MathWorks’ software based on CAD drawings of its bottle-handling robot.

“What we offer is a CAD import functionality,” Wallner says. “So you take these CAD models, and you import them. And then you already have a pretty good basis for your model. You still have to add additional parameters and some of the functionality that is not captured in the CAD model.”  ... '