What is the relationship between digital twins and intelligent manufacturing?

From the perspective of the evolution of the national development strategy of advanced manufacturing in various countries, whether it is the United States from “deindustrialization” to “re-industrialization”, to the “industrial Internet” strategy of “soft with hard”, and then to the national advanced manufacturing strategic plan of the United States; Germany from mechanization, electrification, information technology, to “hard with soft” “Industry 4.0” manufacturing innovation development strategy; Or China from the “information driven industrialization, industrialization to promote information”, to the integration of the two and the deep integration of the two, and then to the “Made in China 2025” of the “integration evolution” TVOC-2-240 1SFA664001R1001 of manufacturing power development strategy, are expected to achieve intelligent manufacturing through information physical integration.

To sum up, intelligent manufacturing is the common development trend of the current world manufacturing industry. How to realize the interconnection and integration of the manufacturing information world and the physical world is one of the bottlenecks towards intelligent manufacturing.

Digital twin is an effective means to realize physical fusion of information. On the one hand, the digital twin can support the virtual and real mapping and two-way interaction between the manufactured physical world and the information world, so as to form a real-time intelligent closed-loop of “data perception – real-time TVOC-2-240 1SFA664001R1001 analysis – intelligent decision – accurate execution”;

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On the other hand, digital twins can fully interact and deeply integrate physical real data such as operating status, environmental changes, and sudden perturbations with information spatial data such as simulation prediction, statistical analysis, and domain knowledge, thus enhancing the synchronization and consistency of the manufactured physical world and the information world.

According to the key words in the table and the statistical analysis of the publishing institution/author, it can be seen that among all the digital twin research results published so far:

The number of papers combining digital twin with Industry 4.0, CPS, intelligent equipment/factory/service, etc. is the largest, accounting for more than half of the total number of digital twin papers published at present;

The number of digital twin papers published in the United States, China and TVOC-2-240 1SFA664001R1001 Germany is the largest in the world, and the papers are mainly from universities and research institutes in intelligent manufacturing related fields in various countries;

In the industry, Siemens, Daimler, ABB and other enterprises that practice the concept of intelligent manufacturing have the most documents. Relevant statistical results show that both academia and industry regard digital twins as one of the key enabling technologies for smart manufacturing.

To sum up, intelligent manufacturing is the common development trend of manufacturing in the world at present, and digital twin is one of the enabling technologies of intelligent manufacturing.