An Engineer’s Real-Time Double.

The use of digital twins for product development, production, and customer services promises to deliver enormous benefits by making it steadily easier to control the behavior of products and production processes. WEISS is confident that this approach will facilitate the integration of rotary indexing tables. Read on to learn the thoughts of three opinion leaders who played key roles in creating ours.

Everybody’s talking about digital twins as one of the most exciting current technological trends. Their use promises to yield enormous benefits in terms of time and cost savings. As a real-time replica of a real-world object, a digital twin supports all aspects of its real sibling’s lifecycle – from planning across creation to final disposal – by calling attention to possible problems and enabling virtual commissioning.

There can be no doubt that digital twins are predestined for production technology, especially as the age of autonomous manufacturing dawns. Digitally mirroring physical objects paves the way for a vast range of analyses with enormous potential for making corrections in and generally optimizing ongoing engineering projects. For companies, whether they are component producers or system integrators, the challenge now is to identify the best ways to embed digital twin applications in processes while making sure that the resulting benefits justify the expense and effort involved.

But who provides these digital models, and who is responsible for taking the initiative for adopting digital twins? WEISS took a hard look at this question and concluded that, from the vantagepoint of development, product management, and sales, they clearly add value for customers.

From Digital Master to Digital Twin. In order for a component manufacturer to join the vanguard by digitalizing its processes, among other things it’s vital for it to create simulation models of its own products. The ongoing evolution from static CAD models to dynamic real-time models is ensuring our products’ digital consistency. Based on a digital master and geometrical data, plus parts lists and information for configuring versions, the principal attributes and functions of digital twins of all kinds can be predefined in a sort of template. For WEISS, this is a form of standardization. It’s then made available, via the ISG TwinStore, for integrators to take advantage of to get closer to the goal of virtual commissioning.

We started by using C/C++ to model the behavior of products of our TC and NC series. Simply modelling the catalog values was enough to make it easier to choose products in the simulation model. A milestone was an HIL simulation with the rotary indexer table controller coupled to the machine controller. This is a clear sign that WEISS should also take this approach for other products and series. And it comes full circle here, because creating a digital twin of a machine depends on having digital twins of its individual components. WEISS is committed to making these available to users.

Adding Value with Digitally Interacting Tools. It’s exciting for users to link together different tools and disciplines instead of considering them separately. For us, digital twins are just one aspect of digital engineering, complemented by other services and tools. The starting point for creating them is a machine’s initial structure, which is modelled in the control software or digital design. Motion control with W.A.S., hardware-in-the-loop simulations, and initial analysis functions link to it to generate smart data that in turn enriches the overall engineering process and facilitates active integration. Ideally, a structure comprising many different digital twins emerges – from individual components across machine modules all the way to entire plants and enabling virtual commissioning. Seen in this way, the value add is enormous throughout a plant’s entire lifecycle, from design across commissioning to maintenance.

Digital engineering is supported by seamless communication interfaces like OPC. This in turn leads to opportunities for making improvements. Digital type plates, Web services, and detection of anomalies are other aspects of these activities. A growing number of integrators are opting for digital twins; the benefits of virtual commissioning are tempting, and we’re already smoothing the path for them now.

Simulation as a Key for Generating Value. It’s becoming increasingly clear that testing complex machine sequences on actual physical systems incurs excessively high costs. The “rule of 10” dictates that the cost of identifying and eliminating defects in a product increases by a factor of 10 in each successive phase of its life cycle. This highlights the importance of doing so as soon as possible to accelerate the pace of development. Digitally paving the way for a machine across all phases of its lifespan ideally involves taking advantage of a digital twin in which all of individual components smoothly mesh. We see this as the best possible way to help our mechanical engineering clients create value, whether it’s with our hardware, software, or brainware. Simulation is the best way to merge the development, commissioning, and ongoing operation of machines. At the end of the day, their performance crucially impacts profit margins.

It’s therefore important to us to offer digitalization as a way for customers to reap greater value from our products. All forms of digital support for industrial automation – whether it’s the ISG TwinStore or application-oriented with Go2Automation – boost the value of smart data in interplay with the customer. And it’s still early days for tapping its potential, because new customer-focused services are constantly emerging, for example in the area of training, also because digital twins only really take off in conjunction with IoT, big data analytics, and artificial intelligence.

At the end of the day … digital twins are the basis for applications and services throughout the lifecycle of machines. As long as data and documents are consistently available on all integrated components, the potential savings over their useful lives are in the double-digit percentage range. They are also the prerequisite for taking advantage of cloud services, which contribute to optimizing production processes – all the way to intelligently evaluating operational data generated by virtual sensors.

During the third phase of a machine’s lifecycle, namely ongoing operation, digital twins demonstrate their value for predictive maintenance. Based on real-time data, digital twins run concurrently as virtual companions in the switch cabinet, thus ensuring accurate forecasts of the life expectancy and condition of actual machine components. Predictive maintenance, error documentation, and remote maintenance systems are just a few examples of what this can involve.

Under the motto?What's Next??The?TeDo-Publishing House ?present a?series ?of articles in cooperation with the WEISS Group that focus on the digital transformation. Both internal and external topics are examined in depth. They follow technology- and customer-oriented possible steps of a digitization strategy and show added values for mechanical engineers or end users.?Join us on this exciting journey ... your WEISS Team.