Harnessing the Production Digital Twin for Aerospace – Transcript
In the latest episode of Talking Aerospace Today, Todd Tuthill and Sunil Chhabra discuss how the production digital twin can help aerospace manufacturers optimize the transformation of their manufacturing processes.
Patty Russo: Greetings and welcome to another episode of Talking Aerospace Today from Siemens Digital Industries Software. I’m Patty Russo and I’m responsible for global marketing for aerospace and defense here at Siemens, and your host for our podcast. Thank you so much for listening. If you heard the previous episodes in this series, you’ll know that we began a conversation about efforts being made in the industry to digitally transform manufacturing, the challenges that our customers in the industry face, and some ways smart manufacturing and automation will play a part in addressing those challenges. In our last episode, we had a special guest, Suresh Rama, and Suresh covered some interesting content around why automation is needed and how it can help transform A&D factories. Today, we welcome another guest to continue this conversation. First, though, let’s welcome our resident expert, regular contributor, Todd Tuthill. Todd is our Vice President of Aerospace, Defense, and Marine here at Siemens. Hi again, Todd.
Todd Tuthill: Hey, Patty. Thank you. Good to be here and I’m looking forward to this conversation today. It’s going to be fun.
Patty Russo: And next, I’d like to welcome Sunil Chabra. Sunil, welcome, and I invite you to please offer a brief introduction.
Sunil Chhabra: Thank you, Patty. Hello, everyone. My name is Sunil Chhabra from Siemens Digital Industries Software. I work in portfolio development focusing on manufacturing engineering. My work centers around helping manufacturers optimize their processes through the use of digital twin technology, and I’m really looking forward to this discussion. Thank you.
Patty Russo: Yeah. So we’re looking forward to an interesting and dynamic discussion today with Sunil. Thank you for making the time to join us and we are going to dive right in. So Todd, we’re picking up kind of where we left off. A little different angle, but let’s first do a quick recap. What is the quote unquote flight path that we took to get to today’s episode and what topics do we want to cover today?
Todd Tuthill: Yeah, I think if you look at, you talked about some of what we’ve been, we talked about the you know, the transition in our industry from crewed to uncrewed aircraft and how that’s causing, you know, changing the volume and the variety that aerospace customers are creating in their aircraft, kind of increasing the volume, and talking about what that does to factories, and the need for reconfigurable factories, reconfigurable manufacturing. And then we talked in the last episode about the automotive industry and what we can learn from the automotive industry about that and how that can apply to aerospace and defense. And then at the end, if I remember, I was talking about the, just introduced the idea of the digital twin of production and you stopped me mid-sentence. You had the gall to interrupt me, but that was, that was the right thing to do, because that’s what we’re going to do today.
Patty Russo: Yes, Todd, I did interrupt you. I wanted to hold off though on that topic so that we could continue it with Sunil because he is an expert in production digital twins. And I’ll start by asking Sunil a question. Can you please describe a production digital twin? What is it and tell us how it’s different than the digital twin of a product.
Sunil Chhabra: Yeah. Thanks, Patty. I’m glad you interrupted Todd. I would really like to start with giving an example dating back to the early 1900s, a century ago We all know about flight simulators. Great example of a virtual representation of flying an aircraft. Realistic environment for training pilots, conducting research. And let’s fast forward to today and apply it to manufacturing. A production digital twin is essentially that it’s a virtual replica of a physical production system. And the second part of your question, by the way, that is a long question, Todd. I could use some help over here, but I’m going to take a stab at the digital twin of the product. The digital twin of the product is all about the product itself. It encompasses product design, engineering, its performance throughout its lifecycle. And a lot of it is about design, optimization, simulation, testing, performance monitoring and predictive maintenance. So one is about the product and the other one is about the manufacturing of the product.
Patty Russo: So it’s a representation of the manufacturing environment, and I can understand a couple of things about that. It’s obviously a little newer concept than the idea of a digital twin of a product. So let’s talk about how can a production digital twin help an A&D company, supplier, manufacturer decide how much factory automation is enough or how much is too much, Sunil?
Sunil Chhabra: Sure, it’s always a tricky question because on one hand you want to automate as much as you can and on the other hand, you think about, “Hey, would this investment be better served if I were to do something else?” So, how does production digital twin help you with that? First thing is it helps you simulate scenarios. You can identify the impact of automation on production efficiency, its quality, its cost, and then you know you can understand the trade-offs and benefits of different levels of automation. That’s one thing. The second one is. Do a detailed cost benefit analysis of different automation strategies. This will help companies understand how much automation is financially viable, and I think I think that’s what that’s the power of the digital twin.
Todd Tuthill: Yeah. And Sunil, if I could kind of jump in here and maybe ask you to expand and this is the place that I’m going to assume a lot of our audience are in, and you will, because we talked about the product digital twin and the production digital twin, and I’m going to guess that a lot of people listening to this podcast think about when they think about a digital twin, they think about the digital twin of the aircraft. Right. It’s going to do what the aircraft does. It’s what you talked about. The flight simulator. And when I think about a digital twin of an aircraft, I always think about a first order model. Is it first order, is it second order, is it third order? You know how detailed does this need to be? Because we talked about, you know, detailed fight physics and simulation and all this stuff. And that’s the analogy on the product side, but I’m trying to think about the production digital twin. And can you talk a bit more about the details of the production digital twin specifically around, you know, to make some of those decisions, how detailed do you have to get down to? Are you modeling every piece of equipment in the factory and every movement that a personnel makes or is there kind of a first order equivalent of that production digital twin?
Sunil Chhabra: It is an iterative process, Todd, in refining and developing the model. I personally like to start with focusing on what are the key bottlenecks that we have in a factory. What is dictating utilization? What is impacting throughput? What is impacting quality? So these KPIs very quickly help you identify what level of detail should I be drilling down while I’m developing my digital twin of production. And yes, it’s an iterative process, the model develops and chances as you come encompass more areas of your factory to help you improve your KPI’s on a continuous basis.
Todd Tuthill: So do you get to the point where you’re modeling each machine and modeling each person. Individually? Or kind of, how far can it go? Because I’m understanding, I want to know where the technology is today.
Sunil Chhabra: You can. You can model humans. You can model machines. You can certainly model interaction of humans with machines. The sky is the limit over here. There is no one size, if you will, that fits all. Each customer has their own mandates and objectives. So a lot of this varies from customers to customers. But yeah, you can pretty much model as much as you want.
Patty Russo: That leads to a question. What’s the current level of adoption for our customers and manufacturing in the industry to do a production digital twin or to take this step forward? The digital twin of the production facility, what’s the maturity or the adoption level today senior?
Sunil Chhabra: There are different levels of automation or adoption, if you will. I would like to say most customers are at Industry 3.0, or is closer to Industry 4.0, but there is an opportunity to have autonomous completely autonomous systems. Currently, most customers are striving to get to industry 4.0.
Patty Russo: And so then let’s say they’ve adopted this practice and this approach. Todd, what’s next? Is it that once a company takes this approach, is the work of the production digital twin of the factory, so to speak, is it finished, and you don’t need it once it’s once the factory is built? and if not what does that look like? Is it something that will continue to benefit the customer for the longer term?
Todd Tuthill: Patty, that’s the great thing about a production digital twin. And you know, Sunil talked about Industry 4.0. We talked about the Internet of Things, and we talked about in some earlier podcasts, when you think about factories of the future and even factories now, they’re full of data. Data is collected on most processes and we’re collecting more and more data all the time, and the really cool part, one of the really cool, interesting things to me about a production digital twin is that its life is just beginning. You know, because we talk about, you know, we did it all. We made the decisions digitally in the digital twin before we build it physically, but once we build it physically, there’s an enormous role for that production digital twin because you gather all that data from all your machines and you don’t just want to put it in Excel and do some math on it. You want to actually put it in there and do, continue to do the scenarios, continue to think about all the things they can do. It really goes to the last step in digital transformation maturity, and this is a test, Patty. What’s that last step?
Patty Russo: Yep, that would be optimize, Todd.
Todd Tuthill: Optimize. That’s right. Because when you think about the life of someone running a factory. What is their job every day? They’re solving problems and they’re optimizing, right? Yeah. There’s an unexpected wiring problem in installations. Or maybe there’s an efficiency area in wing [unintelligible]. Or maybe there’s a six axis milling machine down today. Or maybe you know that, like this never happens in aerospace, right? Maybe they’ve got a key supplier who’s late on deliveries. All those things because when they planned their production, they plan for all those things to be a certain way and it changes. It changes every day. There’s decisions, hundreds and hundreds of decisions that when you’re on a factory, you’re making every day. And the production digital twin can help you anticipate problems by pulling in that data and looking at what it means, but it can also help you make decisions once those issues arise and continue and continue to optimize and make it better. And even when, when you’re at a certain level of throughput or certain level of first pass yield, you may say, “Okay, I’m at you know 95 percent first pass yield. What’s it going to take for me to get to 98?” And like Sunil said, you can use scenarios, you can put in data, you can change market factors and use that to continue and continue to optimize your production environment. To me, that’s a really, really exciting thing that you continue to do with the production digital twin.
Sunil Chhabra: Hey, Todd. Does a, is a pilot ever done with the flight simulator?
Todd Tuthill: Is a pilot ever done? I well, I don’t know if they’re, I don’t think a pilot’s never done learning. A pilot’s never done learning. I think there’s certain times where they they’ve got to do a check, right, to get their, to keep their the license intact for the FAA certification. So that there’s a step where they get to a certain level and say “Okay, now I’m going to go flying a real aircraft.” But pilots continue to learn, and there are things that that hopefully only happen in the simulator, you know.
Sunil Chhabra: Yeah, and that’s the beauty of the production digital twin. It helps you continuously improve your manufacturing processes just like a flight simulator helps a pilot hone their skills on new technologies or new systems, whatever have you. That’s exactly what a production digital twin would do for you.
Patty Russo: Yeah. When you said that, Sunil, what came to mind is that the idea of the quote unquote smart factory and learning have a correlation. It’s like it will continue the whole idea of optimization. It learns what it did before it improves upon it. And what came to mind was the topic that we were talking about early on, the challenges that our customers are facing, specifically related to variants and volume. The industry is being pushed to produce a higher volume, obviously at quality and at cost. And one of the things that they’ve prepared for is a little different approach when it comes to developing products like drones, because variants are such a critical facet of that sector of the industry. So I’m curious, bringing the whole idea of smart manufacturing to life, Sunil, is the production digital twin one of the keys to achieving that?
Sunil Chhabra: Oh, absolutely. I think without a production digital twin, the smart factory execution is impossible. There is so much to learn from the twin from the digital twin, even before any assembly is done. So the foundation of your smart manufacturing is the digital twin. No question.
Patty Russo: Thank you both for sharing your knowledge and expertise. Right now, however, it is time for us to wrap up for today, so this is a good point to pause. We will get back to this discussion on such an important topic in our next episode. To our listening audience, as always, thank you. We sincerely appreciate the time that you make to join these conversations. We trust that you learned something today that you can take back to your team. We’ll be back soon with more, and until then, I’m your host, Patty Russo, and this is Talking Aerospace Today.
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