Functional Module Identification in Product Digital Twins: A Preliminary Study

Abstract

The effect of product architectures on the digital twin (DT) modularity is previously unexplored. The authors present a functional modeling approach to identify the modules that emerge in product DTs in this article. A preliminary study on module identification is presented. A stepwise procedure for functional modeling of the physical twin (PT) followed by module identification based on the functional interdependency with DT is presented. Six examples of product DT from literature were chosen, and functional modeling followed by module identification was carried out. Based on the interdependency of modules, two types of modules were observed — discrete modules and integrated modules. The interdependency of the modules varied depending on the twinning purposes of DTs. The DTs purposed for component health monitoring were observed to have more discrete modules than the integrated ones compared to those with remote operation as their primary twinning purpose. It is also observed that the modular product architectures in PTs may not remain modular in their DT. A few key research questions arising from this exploratory study are also discussed in this paper. The study presented here can potentially offer engineers and researchers in the engineering design community a familiar approach to study novel problems and open new directions of inquiry.