What are the Digital Twin and the Digital Thread?

A digital twin is a virtual representation used to predict performance, verify/validate characteristics, simulate and optimize the asset. The value of a digital twin is how closely the virtual world meets the physical world.

Generally, the twins can be divided into 3 types: Product, Production, and Performance.

Product – the product digital twin helps you predict, test and analyze your product’s performance under different conditions before you build prototypes, and before production. This shortens the time to market.

Production – with the production digital twin representation you can for instance design your production layouts, balance assembly lines, analyze worker safety and assess robot performance. This enables you to ensure and validate manufacturing processes before investing in and starting up production.

Performance – this twin representation provides performance data from your products and plants that are already operating. The information from these “smart products” and “smart plants” provides useful insights for improvements.

This leads us to the second part of the question: What’s the Digital Thread?

The integration between the three Digital Twins product, production and performance is commonly referred to as the Digital thread.

Get a deeper understanding of the Digital Twin from our partner Siemens Digital Industries Software – one of the leaders in this area:  https://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/global/en/our-story/glossary/digital-twin/24465