The Digital Twin is a virtual representation of a material or immaterial object of the real world that not necessarily exists, e.g. in the design phase of a machine. As the concept of Digital Twins is universal, it can thus be applied to almost everything: to machines, tools, processes, human capital, production, and quality KPI, and so on. The characteristics of this information are also various and cover all kinds of data sources, e.g., process data, master data, meta data, or ERP data. Algorithms and applications in general may help to enrich this information.
The Digital Twin is a set of virtual information constructs that fully describes the potential or actual physical product from micro atomic level to macro geometrical level. As its optimum, any information that could be obtained inspecting a physical manufactured product can be obtained from its Digital Twin.
Digital Twins are part of the supply chain throughout the entire lifecycle of products, machines, processes, or services and offer different value and advantages at each stage. Already applied in the design phase, the Digital Twin can handle complex product requirements or fast cycles of development and test different designs with specific simulations to make physical prototyping more and more redundant. This results in time and cost savings in the development of new products and optimizes aggregates and processes already in the design phase. Simulating functionalities and behavior with respect to every relevant aspect, lowers the degree of uncertainty. Since all functionalities can be simulated, commissioning is easier, and processes are error-free.
A Digital Twin offers the possibility of monitoring and reducing risks, which may lead, for example, to a rise in the overall availability of a machine or a process line. Robust prognoses regarding the properties, the quality, and the behavior of products and machines can be identified as well as replacement planning and investigations of upcycling potentials. The concept of the Digital Twin leads to a holistic view on products, machines, processes, and the entire supply chain in real-time. This makes communication between suppliers, producers, and customers easier since they share the same level of knowledge.
Benefits of a Digital Twin at a glance
Monitoring
All relevant plant, machine or product related information is gathered and visualized in a lean and easily understandable way. It is even possible to display real time process data in a 3D replication of the real object where they appear.
Prediction
With the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence, critical aspects of processes, plant condition and availability, and product quality can be predicted and then adjusted to current circumstances.
Simulation
Testing new products or production routines on the Digital Twin is less expensive and faster than real test campaigns. Process optimization and finetuning can be carried out while avoiding risks and production losses.
Education
The ideal replication of the real machines and processes in the virtual world combined with a 3D visualization created directly out of the construction plans makes it easier and faster for new operators or service staff to learn everything about it – from simple maintenance tasks to complex process control.
One unified interface
The Digital Twin application mainly serves as a centralized and unified interface. This means that all applications of the SMS group, SMS digital, and its customers and also third-party apps are invited to connect to the twin to become part of it. The idea is to supply all the knowledge and results bundled in existing applications to the Digital Twin to enrich its data. This way, the Digital Twin keeps growing and becomes more and more reliable with the amount of applications connected to it. The fact that a Digital Twin instance is bound to a unique real object further simplifies the identification in the virtual world for external applications that tend to use their own ID to track objects.
-
Digital Maintenance Twin
In a usual plant, information is often spread over multiple, dedicated computer systems. Very often, each of the systems brings its own asset structure with proprietary keys and own user management.
Especially for plants, that have been in operation for more than 10 years, documentation is often available only in paper form.
Furthermore, systems are often spread over different work places or assigned to specific user groups that use them from a dedicated work place rather than having everything at hand right besides the equipment and in digital form.A digital twin of the plant or plant section – in terms of a data twin – can already be a powerful booster for information management, e.g. for predictive maintenance but not limited to that. With access to not only all kinds of engineering documents, such as drawings, manuals or P&IDs but also to data from maintenance systems (CMMS), condition monitoring system, process automation (e.g. via SMS DataFactory), planning systems (MES), quality systems etc., all information that supports deeper insights on the actual equipment status and wear, on already conducted maintenance activities, the equipment load (e.g. amount of production) help to better plan maintenance and learn about the equipment’s performance capabilities.
The preferred way to access all the distributed systems for the required data is via a web application that caters for the secure connections to the distributed systems and fetches the information right from there without the need of another database with duplicated data. By means of a 3D navigation model, usually created from the design models during engineering, the user can quickly find the equipment without the need to know about the equipment numbers or to map different keys prior to getting to the data.
Every minute that can be saved through the direct access to information via the digital twin can be invested in valuable other activities.
The modular concept of the digital (maintenance) twin allows for later extensions that for instance include modelling and simulation capabilities.
![]()
Benefits
- Have all information in one place – of all connected systems
- Rapid access to information – single sign on
- Immediate information on asset health – e.g. from Condition Monitoring
- Know the maintenance history, see the reports
- See suspicious equipment at once
- Notice accumulating maintenance efforts – see the roots of the problems
- Create work orders – take action
- Scalable – add more systems any time, any kind
- Modular – start small, grow as per needs
- Cloud based or on premise
- On PC and handheld
