Digital Twin is a real-time asset management technology built with the purpose to manage, monitor and predict the performance of industrial systems. The Twin assets are a perfect replica of a physical object that is present inside a manufacturing unit.
The Twin technology creates a comprehensive view of real-world devices such as field sensors, CNC machines, packaging and assembly line machineries, and not the least logistics terminal devices. It handles huge volumes of data streamed from the real-world physical assets and mimics the production environment inside the virtual environment (the IoT cloud).
However, Digital Twin is not a standalone system, instead it is an integration of networks of devices, otherwise known as the “System of Systems (SOS)”.
Inside Digital Twin
The internal working of the Digital Twin technology is a complete synchronization among multiple sub-systems, each independent in their function, continuously sending back data points of different parameters in a preset time interval.
The virtual orchestration of these multiple sub-systems which are operating in different physical spaces happens inside a unified data aggregation platform called the Digital Twin. This collection of subsystems working behind the scenes of the Digital twin interface is known as SOS.
SOS is the backbone of every Digital twin technology working 24/7 streaming real-time data points into data aggression platforms like Twin Central.
Benefits of SOS
The framework of multiple subsystems unified into a single application has a lot of advantages in the context of managing plant operations and improving or optimizing the maintenance practices. Let’s discuss some of the benefits SoS offers to its customers, in various contexts, inside Twin Central.
Manage Downtime
With the real-time stream of data from devices in the SOS network gives an opportunity to create a virtual replica of the physical asset. This virtual replica is then used for modeling the state of the machine that is then used to do predictive maintenance on a proactive basis.
Improve decision making
Managing physical assets pro-actively in real-time helps to identify redundant run cycles and the optimal set of machine parameters that always make machines perform to its best. It also avoids costly downtime that will eat up the production time and cause further delays in the downstream production lines.
Effective production planning
Using SoS assisted manufacturing can make the practice of lean manufacturing a reality. This actively helps improve the productivity of the physical assets, reduce their downtime, optimize usage of resources and in turn make plant operations cost effective in the long run.
Twin Central is a modern, light weight, user friendly Industrial Twin platform which supports integration of multiple SOS and creates a virtual asset map of the physical assets in the production floor.