Siemens/Dow Testbed Promotes Digital Twins

According to Siemens, most of the process industry operates today on methods and workflows that have remained relatively untouched for the last 30 years. It’s on a mission to change that through its testbed, a collaboration with Dow located at MxD, an advanced manufacturing institute and innovation center near downtown Chicago.

The Siemens/Dow testbed is a big part of Siemens’ strategy for promoting digital twins across industries. The company has dedicated significant investment to coordinating digital twin efforts across industries as diverse as aerospace, electronics, transportation, manufacturing, and medicine.

The testbed incorporates a variety of state-of-the-art industrial IoT hardware, including sensors; automation controllers; networking, power distribution, and power monitoring equipment; and drives and motors. These technologies are used to determine and demonstrate ways to improve factory control and integrated modular automation and to adopt augmented reality and digital twins. 

“What’s innovative about the testbed is that it demonstrates that integration can be achieved in a uniform way across process operations, but also extending to the enterprise level,” said Iiro Esko, chemical industries manager for Siemens Digital Industries Software.

The test bed demonstrates the efficacy of digital twins. While engineers and others have long used process representations to manage production, a digital twin is a “collaborative representation” that serves as a real-time counterpart of a physical process or object.

Digital twin uptake may lag unless the value of digital twins is demonstrated in a way that shows how companies can use digital threads to connect previously disconnected workflows. Today, many of these use cases are conceptual prototypes, but testbeds that demonstrate some basic workflows to frontline workers could open ongoing opportunities for improvement down the road.

VentureBeat points out that the testbed follows in the footsteps of the Centers of Excellence (COE) concept companies have been implementing to drive digital process automation technologies. In these cases, companies coordinate activities through a single center that helps showcase success to inspire other use cases across the company.

Siemens and Dow are both doubling down on digital twins.