In the traditional scenario, automation engineers and machine builders work with various providers to program and customize equipment and processes, eventually coming together at the physical plant for a sort of Big Bang integration effort that can take weeks-even months-before all of the kinks are worked out and the production line goes live, notes Eric Harper, senior software architect with ABB. doing them in the real world delivers far greater efficiency.” “Being able to simulate and run what-if scenarios vs. “By having digital twins and overall visibility into manufacturing processes from a commissioning standpoint, you can identify potential bottlenecks and conflicts and minimize them to positively impact the quality of the products you produce,” says John Renick who, as senior director of digital twins and content, oversees GE’s digital twin strategy, which relies on the Predix platform as a core foundation. At the same time, the digital twin environment helps monitor ongoing plant and equipment performance, allowing for optimization and continuous improvement and enabling predictive maintenance-all critical steps to minimizing the risk of costly downtime. The upside is that teams can keep cost overruns in check and streamline the time it takes to get a plant up and running. This allows automation and operations staff to detect and resolve problems early, while reducing the need for real-world adjustments during installation. Much like the engineering use case, the goal for the digital twin in commissioning is to run a factory virtually before ever building or laying out the exact physical environment.
Gartner expects half of industrial companies to be using digital twins in some capacity by 2021, boosting their effectiveness by 10 percent. Thanks to advances in system modeling and automation, as well as simulation software, some companies are going as far as spinning up entire plant floor operations and workflows in a virtual environment as the initial phase of commissioning. The manufacturing sector is starting to head down a similar path, leveraging digital twins as a more effective and less expensive way to plan and commission automation processes and industrial equipment. Three-dimensional (3D) models and, more recently, digital twins are increasingly well-established as the epicenter for optimizing product designs, allowing engineers to hammer out problems and verify key concepts in the digital world without the expense of building costly prototypes.