Industrial Use Cases: 3D Connectivity for Digital Twins: Decoupling 3D data utilization from delivery and file formats on an infrastructure level.

Abstract

With the rapidly growing size of 3D data sets as well as configuration complexity e.g., of assembly structures, the way to an enterprise-wide utilization of 3D product data is already a difficult one. While the 3D Master for engineering & manufacturing is rather established, availability of 3D data along the full value chain e.g., as part of the Digital Thread, and the ability to easily relate it to other business information is still a huge challenge. On top of this, Digital Twins introduce the demand to dynamically link 3D data with IIoT, AI and other business information to visually bring such Digital Twins to live or even into Mixed Reality applications, adding another level of complexity. Building on established Web technology patterns, we experienced that an API-based harmonization over (brownfield) data backends and file formats can help to establish a "single source of truth" as a prerequisite for the required agile utilization of 3D data and highly flexible interconnectivity. Many solutions rely on explicitly exporting and preparing use case or application specific subsets of 3D data before making such available, often heavily limiting its utilization on the way. Instead, a high level of interconnectivity is achievable by combining a virtualization of 3D data and algorithms with a unified addressing scheme to abstract over file boundaries and formats while enabling dynamic resolution and mapping of contained 3D data elements with business information on many levels. In our talk, we will present the underlying approach and explain its utilization throughout several industrial use cases in the area of Digital Twins with a focus on dynamic linkage and enrichment of 3D product data across software, solution and format boundaries.