Industry Summary Articles

Industrie 4.0 and the dozens of Smart Factory initiatives worldwide seek to close the loop between product design and the product (software included) as produced in its final form. At their fundamental level, these initiatives are joining what design engineers set out to provide the customer and what the customer expected.

Industrie 4.0 refers to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, i.e., the new pre-eminent role of data and information in manufacturing and, less obviously, eliminating anything still on paper (“analog”) such as preprinted forms and setup sheets.

Its promised benefits cannot be fully achieved without establishing much greater control over information about production assets and centralizing that control with lifecycle management. Unless the gains can be analyzed, replicated, and shared, the innovations and competitive advantages that emerge from Smart Factories and Industrie 4.0 initiatives cannot be built upon. They may even be unsustainable.

Taking full advantage of Smart Factory innovations increasingly requires creating and maintaining digital twins of production assets and digital threads production-related data. Until now, most digital twins have represented products—physical things delivered to customers. The development of digital twins / digital threads for assets such as factory equipment and processes needs to be stepped up.

Moreover, these production asset-focused digital twins and digital threads must be enabled with Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). PLM-enabled digital threads and digital twins promise to link the physical and digital worlds of manufacturing to a greater extent than ever before.

Given the incomplete understanding of digital twins and digital threads, broader definitions may be helpful

In the factory, Digital twins are virtual representations of the enterprise's assets, one twin for each physical production process, for example, along with its related production tools, and all that defines and supports them. The digital twin represents the asset at a specific point in time—“as-operated”—and on through the end of the asset's lifecycle. Digital twins of assets are holistic, lifelike, and can be animated as simulations.

A digital thread is the communication framework that allows a continuous data flow into and integrated views of an asset's digital twin. Via digital threads, digital twins are connected to the factory's internal data networks for tooling, inspection, certifications, and much else.

The digital thread gathers, secures, tracks, and moves data from where it is created or stored to where it creates value by providing insights to human decision makers, analysts, and programmers. Enabling the digital thread with lifecycle management ensures that data about the configuration of an asset is always clear, concise, and valid.

Digital thread lifecycles are also holistic, tying engineering to the shop floor and manufacturing, i.e., connecting design processes to production processes. Holistic lifecycles begin at conception and extend through the end of the asset’s useful life. The information in these lifecycles is central to all digital transformations.

“Holistic” information includes all of a production operation's many process plans and work instructions, modifications such as re-engineering for regulatory compliance, and tweaks for manufacturing productivity as well as sensor data from factory-floor networks. Holistic also includes data from the Internet of Things (IOT) and the manufacturing world's Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT)

Digital twins and digital threads of the factory’s major pieces of production equipment link requirements to design and production capabilities, along with actual production operations, measurement and quality devices, changes in tooling and routings, etc. The “what was done” is also captured so that the digital twin of each resulting product can show exactly what manufacturing assets and processes were used to produce it.

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