Digital Twin Bionics: A Biological Evolution-Based Digital Twin Approach for Rapid Product Development

Abstract

With intensified market competition, product development procedure is accelerated, requiring rapid product innovation and efficient collaboration between design and manufacturing. However, there still exist information islands, prohibiting integration of product life cycle processes. To address this issue, bionics and digital twin (DT) are combined as a potential solution. The concepts, framework, and features of digital twin bionics (DTB) is originally proposed, with co-evolution mechanism of product-twins (including virtual and physical products) and production-twins (including virtual and physical production) elaborated. A symbiotic co-evolution mechanism is presented to integrate the processes of product development and manufacturing. In detail, the supporting technologies, such as industrial internet of things, cloud edge computing, big data, and artificial intelligence, as well as the potential key technologies, are illustrated. A case study for rapid development of automotive body-in-white in an industrial robotics welding production line is investigated to verify the applicability of the proposed framework. The results suggest that the integration of bionics and DTs can accelerate the innovations and developments of new products and also help to achieve efficient management of production construction.