What problem does the product solve?

Thanks to our extensive domain expertise, we can uniquely interlink the Digital Twins in any industry. These virtual images of actual machines, plants, processes, and products help companies of all sizes to develop, implement, and optimize their products and processes along the entire value chain.

What’s new/innovative about it?

In the manufacturing industry, a Digital Twin has three forms: the product, the production, and the performance of the product and production. The design of new products or machines already results in the Digital Twin of the product, whose properties and behavior can be realistically simulated with the help of the corresponding software.

What is the product’s main benefit for the customer?

This enables tests and validation of complex products without the need for physical prototypes.

In what way does the product contribute to integrated processes and/or Industry 4.0?

The Digital Twin of production results from the virtual image of the production planning and automation; but unlike in the past, here the product determines the production. The co-simulation of mechanics, electronics, and automation leads to a comprehensive simulation model that serves as the basis for virtual commissioning. Even after the physical production of the end product, the Digital Twin continues to be supplied with data from the analysis of the production plants and the products. Thanks to the widespread distribution of Totally Integrated Automation (TIA), our integrated automation components, all relevant data is available at the shop floor level. In addition, that same data can be further analyzed thanks to the collection and evaluation in MindSphere, our cloud-based, open IoT operating system. Feeding all these findings back into the entire value chain, including back into the product design, generates a completely closed decision-making cycle for ongoing optimization.

In the process industry, the Digital Twin allows for the optimization of processes – from integrated engineering to integrated operations and services. It is created automatically during the engineering phase and is then continuously updated, both in greenfield and brownfield plants. Here the digital enterprise is created from the Digital Twin of our engineering system through the automatic bidirectional exchange of data with our automation system. Thanks to a cloud connection and data analysis, even the field level, such as the drive components, becomes a part of the digital enterprise and enables efficient fleet management, among other things. The continual analysis of data from the entire plant and its processes leads to a new dimension of transparency that significantly improves maintenance, service, and availability.