Virtual Prototyping: Evaluating the Digital Twin Based Virtual Factory for New Product Introduction

Abstract

Shortening lifecycles and increasing complexity make product and production lifecycle processes more challenging than ever for manufacturing enterprises. Virtual Prototyping (VP) technologies promise a viable solution to handle such challenges in reducing time and physical builds as well as increasing quality. In previous studies, the Digital Twin (DT) based Virtual Factory (VF) concept showed significant potential to handle co-evolution by integrating 3D factory and product models with immersive and interactive 3D Virtual Reality (VR) simulation technology as well as real-time bidirectional data synchronisation between virtual and physical production systems. In this article, we present an extension to the paper “Demonstrating and Evaluating the Digital Twin Based Virtual Factory for Virtual Prototyping” presented at CARV2021. The study presents an evaluation by industry experts of the DT based VF concept for VP in the context of New Product Introduction (NPI) processes. The concept is demonstrated in two cases: wind turbine blade manufacturing and nacelle assembly operations at Vestas Wind Systems A/S. The study shows that the VF provides an immersive virtual environment, which allows the users to reduce the time needed for prototyping. The industry experts propose several business cases for the introduced solution and find that the phases that would have the most gain are the later ones (production) where the product design is more mature.

Digital twin application in heritage facilities management: systematic literature review and future development directions

“…In recent years, scholars comprehend and interpret DT with the knowledge and practice from a specific industry and aim to integrate the characteristics of the industry into a DT-based (or DT-supported) frameworks or mechanisms. Some of these frameworks or mechanisms are to be further modified for use in design (Li et al, 2019;Tao et al, 2019), monitoring (Zipper et al, 2018;Revetria et al, 2019;Lu et al, 2020a), prototyping (Yildiz et al, 2021) and training (Kaarlela et al, 2020) in the respective industries (Hasan et al, 2022). Having gained popularity in a wide range of industries such as astronautical, aerospace, manufacturing, mechanical and infrastructure engineering (Rasheed et al, 2020), DT has been adopted to build the cyberphysical models for supporting digital development in the field of built environment.…”

Conceptual foundations and extension of digital twin-based virtual factory to virtual enterprise

“…Therefore, there is a need for (1) discussions and reflections on previously uncovered contextual knowledge [16][17][18] that leads to new ways of understanding the proposed DTbased VF concept, (2) adequate discussions on conceptual and theoretical foundations of comprehensive solutions based on both theoretical and empirical knowledge, and (3) for extending such concept to an enterprise-level for handling co-evolution based on more tangible artefacts and demonstrations.…”

“…Discussion in this article is built upon the previously published studies and, therefore, draws its conceptual and theoretical arguments on previous empirical studies conducted in the application domain [11,12,[16][17][18][19][20]. Although some conceptual and theoretical aspects presented and extensively discussed in this work were pointed out in some of the previous studies, there were not well-framed and dedicated discussions on the subject goals.…”

“…Subsequently, they enhanced the VF concept and introduced and demonstrated the DT-based VF, which has the potential for more dynamic, open, and holistic representations of complex manufacturing systems and operations in immersive virtual environments [17]. Empirical studies on the DT-based VF concept in industrial cases demonstrate that DT-based VF stands out as a promising CPS to support manufacturing enterprises for handling co-evolution [16][17][18]. Since this article is formed on a collection of previously published papers, each of which articulates on various interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary empirical issues, we strongly advise the reader to refer to such works [11,12,[16][17][18][19][20] for extensive knowledge on pragmatic validity and practical relevance.…”

“…Empirical studies on the DT-based VF concept in industrial cases demonstrate that DT-based VF stands out as a promising CPS to support manufacturing enterprises for handling co-evolution [16][17][18]. Since this article is formed on a collection of previously published papers, each of which articulates on various interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary empirical issues, we strongly advise the reader to refer to such works [11,12,[16][17][18][19][20] for extensive knowledge on pragmatic validity and practical relevance. In addition, because the visual contents conceivably have more potential to convey far-reaching knowledge to the audience, we also strongly recommend readers to review the public media documents on (1) integrated VF simulations [21], (2) collaborative and coordinated VR training [22] and (3) outbound supply chain simulation demo [23], which is incorporated by the extension of DT-based VF to the virtual enterprise.…”