Industry 4.0: Virtual Twin Controls Production

Efficient production control is a key industrial technology. The notion of building up two parallel factories instead of one may sound like nothing but doubling of effort. But what if one of the factories existed only in virtual form? This is the basic idea behind an innovative concept from the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology IPK in Berlin. The real factory is fully modeled at the digital level, creating a virtual twin that not only visualizes the production system with all its machines, but also reproduces the dynamic processes and the behavior of system components during production in real time.