Through advance testing on digital models, virtual commissioning helps to improve the quality of control software and accelerate production startups. But the resulting digital twins can also serve as the basis for new business processes and models.
A digital twin is a computer-based model of a tangible or intangible object that can be used for various tasks. With a digital twin in the production environment, it is often irrelevant whether the counterpart already exists in the real world or not yet. The digital twin can accompany the life cycle of a production plant from design, construction, operation and recycling. In virtual commissioning (VIBN), the production plant is described by its digital image as a virtual plant. If this representation consists of virtual components that exhibit the same behavior as real components in terms of interfaces, parameterization and operating modes, and enable reproducible tests including safety, then the results are transferable in both directions between the real and the virtual representation in the sense of a digital twin.