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Understanding what a digital twin could do for you

From virtual commissioning to performance modeling, digital twin technology can provide a wide array of benefits. It’s important to decide first what you want from it to know what you’ll need to put into it.

Digital twin is a term often bandied about around increasingly digital industrial environments. Though its definition has been interpreted in a number of different ways, there’s little debate about the benefits that manufacturers can achieve throughout the production lifecycle. Providing a virtual representation of a physical asset, a digital twin provides all kinds of opportunities to understand how assets will perform—during production or before a machine is even built.

“It’s really the underlying physics of how everything works and how you can use that as a technology to predict a whole range of variables for how things are going to perform,” said Graham Jackson, engineering specialist for Maplesoft.

“It could be a digital twin to a machine, a process or a plant, tying it to the digital twin of the automation,” noted John DeTellem, product marketing manager for Siemens. Instead of testing everything in the real world, he added, a digital twin enables you to avoid the risk of crashes or damages associated with incorrect process parameters.

Jackson and DeTellem joined David Greenfield, director of content/editor in chief for Automation World, on the stage at the recent Automation World Conference & Expo in Chicago to help clarify the possibilities available with digital twin technology and the best way to get started.

Virtual commissioning is a key value of digital twin technology, DeTellem and Jackson agreed. Contrary to traditional commissioning, virtual technology enables engineers and operators to connect to a machine’s mechanical design before the machine is even being built, DeTellem noted. “You can see what is going to be possible with the equipment before you even start to build the machine.”

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