Digital Twin Spawns Automation Efficiencies
By Beth Stackpole , Automation World Contributing Writer, on June 6, 2017
At Rockwell Automation, the whole premise of the digital twin is to remove the need for the physical asset, whether it’s to test the actual hardware or control systems, notes Andy Stump, business manager for the company’s design software portfolio. Rockwell’s Studio 5000 Logix Emulate software enables users to validate, test and optimize application code independent of physical hardware while also allowing connectivity to third-party simulation and operator training systems to help teams simulate processes and train operators in a virtual environment.
In this context, a digital twin can be employed to provide a safer, more contextualized training environment that focuses on situational experience. “It helps with emergency situations, starting up and shutting down—things you don’t encounter ever day,” Stump explains.
A digital twin of a control system created in the Logix Emulate tool could also be tapped for throughput analysis, Stump adds, ensuring, for example, that a packaging machine could handle a new form factor without having to actually bring down the machine to test the new design. “Any time you take a machine out of production, it’s expensive,” he says. “If you can estimate that a machine is going to be down 60 percent of the time running what-if scenarios in a digital twin, there’s a lot of money to be saved.”
Moving forward, Rockwell will leverage new technologies such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) to enhance its vision for a digital twin. At the Hannover Fair in April, the company demonstrated a next-generation, mixed-reality virtual design experience using its Studio 5000 development environment with the Microsoft HoloLens VR headset.
For Siemens, the concept of a digital twin straddles both product design and production. In a production capacity, the digital twin exists as a common database of everything in a physical plant—instrument data, logic diagrams, piping, among other sources—along with simulation capabilities that can support use cases like virtual commissioning and operator training. Comos, Siemens’ platform for mapping out a plant lifecycle on a single data platform, and Simit, simulation software used for system validation and operator training, now have tighter integration to support more efficient plant engineering and shorter commissioning phases, says Doug Ortiz, process automation simulation expert for Siemens. In addition, Comos Walkinside 3D Virtual Reality Viewer, now with connectivity to the Oculus Rift Virtual Reality 3D glasses, enables a more immersive experience, allowing plant personnel to engage in realistic training and virtual commissioning exercises, he says.
“Customers want to get plants from the design stage to up and running in the shortest period of time and these tools are paramount for that,” Ortiz says. “The digital twin is great to use for any plant for the lifecycle of that unique plant.”
Improved maintenance opportunities
While most companies in the automation space are settling in with the digital twin for roles in operator training, virtual commissioning and optimization, there is still not a lot of activity leveraging the concept for predictive and preventive maintenance opportunities. The exception might be GE Digital, which is clearly pushing this use case as its long-term vision.
GE Digital sees four stages of analytics that will be impacted by digital twin and IoT:
- Descriptive, which tells plant operators information about what’s happening on a system like temperature or machine speed.
- Diagnostics, which might provide some context for why a pump is running at over speed, for example.
- Predictive, which uses machine learning, simulation and real-time and historical data to alert operators to potential failures.
- Prescriptive, which will advise operators about a specific course of action.
GE Digital showed off a digital twin representation of a steam turbine to showcase what is possible in the areas of predictive and prescriptive maintenance at its Minds + Machines conference last November.
“A digital twin is a living model that drives a business outcome, and this model gets real-time operational and environmental data and constantly updates itself,” said Colin J. Parris, vice president of software research at GE Global’s research center, during the presentation. “It can predict failures…reduce maintenance costs and unplanned outages, and…optimize and provide mitigation of events when we have these types of failures.”
Though the digital twin is certainly making headway in production, it’s still in its early days. “Digital twin is definitely hot right now, but it really depends on what the customer is trying to achieve and what they are trying to model,” says Bryan Siafakas, marketing manager in Rockwell Automation’s controller and visualization business, adding that it’s just a matter of time. “There is a huge upside in terms of productivity savings and shortened development cycles.”