Demystifying Digital Twins using Thread and Straws

Why do Digital Threads and Digital Twins need Digital Straws, or, how do PLM and Data Governance dovetail with each other?

It is hard to read an article about Product Lifecycle Management in modern manufacturing industries without reading the terms Digital Twin, Digital Thread, and Data Governance. But what do these terms really mean and how are they related? In this article, we will try to demystify these powerful concepts that are the key to achieving previously unimaginable innovations in future products.?

?WHAT ARE DIGITAL TWINS?

If you talk to any number of PLM, CRM, or ERP vendors, you'll get an equal number of definitions of what they mean by "digital twin" or "virtual twin". For the purposes of this article, I chose to use IBM's definition: "A digital twin is a virtual model designed to accurately reflect a physical object” with a clarification from the Digital Twins Consortium “A digital twin is a virtual representation of real-world entities and processes, synchronized at a specified frequency and fidelity.” In other words, with Digital Twins, the behavior of products being simulated or being operated in the field can be used to influence and improve design and product performance. What this means in more concrete terms for manufacturing is that the 3D models created by designers in a CAD system and modeled by engineers in a PLM are connected to simulated or real-world data coming from sensors (IIOT production data or IOT operational data) or calculations (CAE, CFD, FEA, etc.) so that the 3D model also reflects how the product behaves in the real world.?

?This means that while I am designing my product, I can be running simulations in software or with physical prototypes and modify the design in real time. It also means that I can leverage virtual reality (VR) or augmented reality (AR) to connect design data to work instructions in production or work orders in maintenance to increase worker safety and product quality.

?WHAT ARE SOME OF THE PRE-REQUISITES FOR CREATING DIGITAL TWINS

?To connect the data coming from the simulated or real work, somehow, I need to enhance my CAD data with a variety of data coming from other sources and I need my method of working to be able to co-habit with these various data sources.?

?Model-Based

One of the early key innovations in PLM was the concept of putting the model of the product at the center of the design process by combining the new 3D modeling capabilities with proven systems engineering concepts. The original systems engineering concept is often represented as a giant V with development on the left side and production on the right side, as shown below from the Wikipedia page on "V-model".

?As companies adopted PLM and integrated their systems engineering into their deployments, the field of Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) was born. One of the most famous representations being the Boeing "Black Diamond".?

One way to think about this is that model-based paradigms are a top-down process of creating models for all the various aspects of the virtual product to consider. The models must be sufficiently open to integrate a wide variety of tools from MCAD to ECAD to Simulation and Production Planning in order to fully flesh out the Digital Twin that is being built. The complication comes from the variety of enterprise systems required for all this data: PLM, PDM, MES, and ERP are just the tip of the iceberg.

?Digital Thread

In order to bring together data from all these systems, one could just build one-to-one integrations between them, but in that case, we end up with IT spaghetti.

Ultimately, this is impossible to maintain and totally unscalable. What is desired is a more comprehensive and coherent approach to Data Governance. The approach chosen will depend on a variety of factors: use of Cloud infrastructure, IT and PLM Maturity, the perceived need for a global Data Governance approach, and so on. For this reason, it is hard to talk of a truly scalable and agile Digital Thread without presupposing a solid Data Governance strategy.

Digital "Straws"

To demonstrate the challenges of building Twins from sensor data, imagine pulling in terabytes of second-by-second sensor readings and trying to display them in your CAD tool. It would be nearly impossible because of the data volumes. This is where the "straw" comes in. Typically, IOT data is treated on the "edge" to filter out unnecessary data before sending it to a cloud-based storage area commonly called a "data lake".?

The data lake contains tera- or even petabytes of data drawn from heterogeneous sources but with some metadata to identify which sensor in the real world the data corresponds to. In order to pull this data into an engineering context for a Digital Twin, the data needs to be pulled from the lake via a "straw" and fed to the model. This is typically done via Spark queries and requires some customization on the CAD/PLM side for visualizing the data. The tools are maturing, but this remains a growth area for PLM systems in general.

Digital Twins

So, now that I have a model to recuperate the data, the digital thread to connect the data sources, and a stream of data filtered by my "straw", I can now visualize my product under various behavioral conditions and improve my design and use these new insights to innovate on unique parameters. As I said earlier, Model-Based approaches are top-down whereas Digital Twins are bottom-up starting with the data coming in and adapting the model to compensate for it.?

(See https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Five-dimension-model-left-and-composition-and-application-of-digital-twins-right_fig1_370025297)

We can change the color of parts of the 3D model based on the incoming data or draw vectors representing wind direction or airspeed from wind tunnel results. The possibilities are truly endless. But at the center of these capabilities is the incoming data.

CONCLUSION

Digital Twins for manufacturing customers result from the conjunction of a series of technical enablers such as Digital Threads and design paradigms such as Model-Based Systems Engineering to model real-world or simulated behavior directly on a 3D model. They represent one of the most powerful new concepts in PLM and work at the intersection of the worlds of design, engineering, production, operations, and service which necessitates an advanced maturity in Data Governance to succeed.