Towards the Smart Factory: Process Optimization in Virtual Commissioning

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Abstract
Since the early 1990s, virtual models have been used in production planning to digitally support production lines before beginning physical construction. These digital models, commonly referred to as “digital twins”, are currently primarily used for virtual commissioning. Despite being first used decades ago, digital twins are still not established in production planning on a global scale. The benefits of developing and testing a planned system in a virtual model are often not fully capitalized. While this can be partially explained by the technological challenges of designing accurate virtual models, we argue that the current processes for production planning are another important factor that hinder the widespread use of digital twins. In this paper, we summarize and analyze each step and the involved participants in a typical production planning workflow. Based on this analysis, we discuss how current practices conflict with the goal of incorporating virtual models into the established work environment. Then, we derive concrete recommendations of how a production process can be adjusted to allow easier digital twinning, showing how comparatively few changes could make virtual models significantly easier to apply.