Cost-efficient digital twins for design space exploration: A modular platform approach
Journal article, 2023

The industrial need to predict the behaviour of radically new products brings renewed interest in how to set up and make use of physical prototypes and testing. However, conducting physical testing of a large number of radical concepts is still a costly approach. This paper proposes an approach to actively use digital twins in the early phases where the design can be largely changed. The approach is based on creating a set of digital twin modules that can be reused and recomposed to create digital twin variants. However, this paper considers that developing a digital twin can be very costly. Therefore, the approach focuses on supporting the decisions about the optimal mix of modules, and about whether a new digital twin module should be developed. The approach is applied to an industrial case derived from the collaboration with two space manufacturers. The results highlight how the design of the modular platform has an impact on the cost of the digital twin, if commonality and reusability aspects are considered. These results point at the cost-efficiency of applying a modular approach to digital twin creation, as a means to reuse the results from physical testing to validate new designs and their ranges of validity

Digital Twin

Modular Platform Development

Modular Digital Twin Platform

Data-Driven Design

Author

Massimo Panarotto

Chalmers, Industrial and Materials Science, Product Development

Ola Isaksson

Chalmers, Industrial and Materials Science, Product Development

Vanessa Vial

SAFRAN Aircraft Engines

Computers in Industry

0166-3615 (ISSN)

Vol. 145 103813

Subject Categories

Production Engineering, Human Work Science and Ergonomics

Design

Interaction Technologies

DOI

10.1016/j.compind.2022.103813

More information

Latest update

12/28/2022