Digital Twins seem initially like a stage to achieve towards the end of a digitalization journey. However, this paper shall provide the reasoning and motivation to place the digital twin at the beginning of the digital transformation of automation processes. The benefits are accelerated collaboration and frontloaded iteration to increase quality and reliability. Enabling key concepts of Industry 4.0, a digital twin allows for more efficient operations during planning, development, runtime, and changeover.
Most industrial companies must face big challenges like shorter time-to-market, cost reduction, better quality, and increased flexibility to adapt to market changes. Digitalization seems to hold the answer to these challenges. Through new, disruptive technologies like digital twins, AI, edge computing, cloud services, traditional workflows can be shortened. So how can digitalization address these complex challenges?
