Autor: Steffen Schwarzer

Intelligent digital twins (IDT), as the next evolutionary stage of digital twins, have the potential to accelerate and optimize processes within companies. The intelligent twin presented here independently analyzes 3D CAD data and automatically conducts a physical simulation of the assembly. Utilizing the IDT optimized assembly, reduces production costs and accelerates the production planning process. This specific use case illustrates the broader possibilities and advantages of IDTs, offering valuable insights for their transferability.

SME often encounter risks and obstacles when implementing IIoT solutions, but these challenges can be mitigated with the use of an IIoT platform. To select the appropriate platform, a decision- making approach has been developed. By choosing the right use cases, companies can directly benefit from IIoT implementation and gain a competitive edge in the market. Our research indicates that at least three applications have a favorable balance between benefits and effort. Once successfully implemented, these applications can be expanded and scaled as the company becomes more digitally proficient.

Manufacturing SMEs are structurally di erent from other companies and therefore have special requirments for Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) and the associated software selection. Process models must therefore be adapted. For the identication of requirements, a systematic categorization based on existing models was performed. With the help of an existing market research platform, further selection steps were developed in order to provide a useful and easy-to-use tool for SMEs, which enables them to select efficiently sufficient MES-software according to their needs.