Introduction to the Digital Twin of a Process Plant

Recently popularized, as a term with no unique definition, digital twin refers to a high-fidelity digital replica of the physical object that updates and exchanges data synchronously with its physical counterpart. Data is continuously gathered and updated in real-time. A variety of digital twin types and expressions are used in research and practice for a wide range of use cases throughout the product lifecycle. The digital twin is used not only in technical domains. Its appearance is also registered in medicine, economy, and social sciences because the digital counterpart can be imagined for almost every artifact in the real world. The requirements for a digital twin are rigorous, especially if the digital twin of an existing system needs to be generated. In industrial practice, this means that the entire model must be manually rebuilt which induces costs and takes a long time. Considering its benefits, the digital twin is now obviously going to become an indispensable companion of a complex industrial system along its lifecycle which may last several decades. A process plant emerges from a laboratory level where the basic principles are developed, over the mini-plant level where the production parameters are adjusted, to the production plant level where the production occurs in the real environment. In plant engineering, the industry has been looking for an appropriate approach for a long time to generate the digital twin of a brownfield process plant. Moreover, process plants are subject to different, frequent changes during their long lifecycle. Examples are the implementation of new apparatus or the integration of new equipment in the process, as well as a change in the layout of the production. To avoid inaccuracies or inconsistencies during the retrofit, an efficient updating process is essential for an existing twin of a process plant. For this market segment, appropriate concepts and efficient solutions need to be elaborated and developed, including modern IT techniques. In this introductory chapter, the underlying approach for this book is drawn. The idea of the digital twin, the origins, the goals, the expected audience, the problem definition, and the objective of the work of this book are roughly described. Hence, we give the first insight into the content of this book and the mutual interdependence of the chapters. This book paves the way for how to generate and commercialize the digital twin of a process plant as a service in a collaboration scenario.