From framework to industrial implementation: the digital twin in process planning

In today’s fast-paced market, companies are challenged to meet increasing customer demands and shorter product life cycles. To successfully respond to these demands, companies must produce a wide variety of different products. This requires the determination of necessary processes and resources for each product, which can be difficult for process engineers due to the high manual effort and expertise involved. The current state of research has not yet provided explicit definitions of the necessary knowledge and has not fully achieved complete process planning automation. To address this challenge, a digital twin is a valuable tool for automating and understanding process planning. This paper presents a digital twin concept for process planning. It automatically analyzes the product, determines production processes, and selects appropriate resources by linking information about products, resources, and processes. The effectiveness of the digital twin concept is demonstrated through verified and validated use cases, including the production of a compressor element.