Over the recent years, several attempts were made to define the concept of the Digital Twin and to create a generic view for utilizing it within the industry. Still, many industry sectors are not able to transfer a generic definition into their product portfolio, as Digital Twins differ from each other to the same degree as physical products differ from each other. Hence, it is crucial to enlarge the definition towards a classification and business scenarios which enable sector specific views on the concept of the Digital Twin and help SME to utilize the concept towards their products. Future engineers will have to design physical products besides a digital counterpart and therefore have to identify interdependencies between these two products during the development. This paper discusses a generic definition of a Digital Twin that can be applied throughout different sectors as well as a classification for Digital Twins to enable the implementation of the concept on several maturity levels regarding the constraints of the product portfolio. In addition, these classes are viewed in different business scenarios and an outlook is given to further increase the usability of Digital Twins within new industry sectors.
The implementation of Digital Twins has become a common task for many industrial companies to ensure a sufficient digitization of their products and maintain competitiveness. This results in the question of how to compensate additional effort caused by designing Digital Twins. With this paper, an approach for this compensation is presented by creating Digital Twin behaviour through utilizing SysML diagrams and directly derivate usable code from them for a further implementation. This offers a part solution of lowering the threshold for using MBSE and increasing its benefits.
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