Aras Low Code for Industrial Digital Twins

  • July 29, 2020
  • William Payne

Low code digital industrial platform provider Aras has released a new application, Digital Twin Core, that extends Aras’ low-code capabilities for creating and managing digital twins. The Aras Digital Twin Core application provides new functionality for defining the digital twin configuration. The new application provides context for interpretation and analysis of IoT sensor data for complicated scenarios such as predictive maintenance, performance optimisation, and over-the-air software updates.

A digital twin provides a virtual representation of a specific physical asset or unique product instance.

Current digital twin initiatives focus on maintenance effectiveness, recalls, closed-loop quality, product innovation, and production throughput. Problems occur during analysis due to a lack of context or inaccuracies about that asset or product.

Aras Digital Twin Core creates and manages the exact digital representation of an individual physical asset and its changes over time. This digital twin configuration mirrors a specific unit in operation such as an individual vehicle by VIN or aircraft by tail number. Digital Twin Core provides a low-code editor for modelling, adapting and extending highly sophisticated configuration twin representations. When combined with Aras 3D dynamic product navigation and graph views, users gain advanced visualisation to see digital twin relationships throughout the product structure.

Related Aras functionality further extends Digital Twin Core capabilities for complex scenarios. Connectors to existing systems – such as ERP, PDM, CAD and others – provide connectivity to derive and persist configuration twin data from other sources and ensure digital thread traceability across the life-cycle. Open APIs enable connections with IoT cloud services and data lakes to bring together configuration twins with time series sensor data for analysis. Then, simulation management with Aras enables the combination of configuration twins in simulations with real world loading data for insights into wear & tear, stress impacts, and other effects that result from ongoing operation of the asset.

“As a real-world asset is maintained, updated and retrofitted, companies need the ability to easily reflect the real-time accurate status of the digital twin configuration,” said Peter Schroer, Founder and CEO of Aras. “Without an accurate configuration twin, companies risk analysis misinterpretations that lead to incorrect actions, safety issues and liability scenarios.”

“As manufacturers continue to digitally transform, and product, supply chain, and operation complexity increases, manufacturers and owner operators are using digital twins to optimise product and asset quality and improve the customer experience. The ability to manage an assets configuration as it changes overtime is a foundational element to an effective digital twin strategy,” said Jeff Hojlo, Program Director of Product Innovation at IDC.