Digital Platform Twin - DPT

Purpose and goal

The purpose of the project has been to investigate whether digital twins, who can represent a variety of products and manufacturing machinery, can be used to support conceptual development phases. The goal has been to contribute in creating a digital development environment that utilizes existing design and manufacturing knowledge to make more reliable design decisions. This has been made possible by improving a functional modeling technique and a PLM environment, which has been successfully demonstrated in a real case from GKN.

Expected results and effects

Results show how previously designed products and manucaturing machinery i can be modeled and interconnected as a basis for reusing design and production information among many new concepts. A combination of rule-based (fast) and simulation-based (more accurate) methods for producibility assessments is presented. The approach can support in the selection among many new concept alternatives with greater reliability on concept feasibility.

Planned approach and implementation

The project has been conducted by Chalmers and GKN. Together, the parties have been able to demonstrate the new methods by modeling the interplay between a function-varying aircraft engine component and available welding technologies. However, a limitation of this demonstration is the lack of real-time data of the interplaying systems, which is an important part of the concept of “digital twin”. By including real-time data, the assessments can be increasingly reliable. Therefore, the results and future direction of this project can make up for a future research agenda.