The most prestigious Italian economic newspaper, “Il Sole 24 Ore”, in the edition of 6th November 2017, dedicates an article to “3D Training thanks to Digital Twins”.
Below is an excerpt from the article, which is fully shown in the gallery.
The “Digital Twin” is the newborn of the mix between Industry 4.0 and artificial intelligence, between real data coming from the production and analysis and computing systems. Robert Plana, innovation & ecosystem director of General Electric Digital, explained, inspired by the language of biologists, that "the digital twin is a sort of “in vivo” model of a plant or production line created by crossing the real operating data and Cad & digital drawings used for design. The “Digital Twin” allows you to build a virtual copy of the real plant (but also of a single machine) that can totally replicate the real operations or check out all its possible alternatives.
Today there are many data analysis platforms allowing the creation of “Digital Twins”, developed by Groups such as Sap, Dassault Systèmes, Cisco, Intel and many more. But what is the use of a virtual copy of a plant that runs in synchrony with the real one? Indeed, it serves many purposes.
The Italian Fameccanica Group, one of the world's leading players in the diaper and sanitary napkin industry, has implemented a "virtual room" in which its own machines, huge and complex structures, can be reproduced in real and 3D dimension, both for an improved product development and for maintenance purposes. Virtual models can then be used in tablet applications to guide on-site maintainers even thousands of miles away from the Company headquarters in Chieti: by simply framing the machine section with the camera and identifying where to work, video tutorials or specific instructions are immediately recalled.