Digital Twins for predictive maintenance: A case study for a flexible IT-architecture

The Digital Twin offers great potential for use in predictive maintenance applications to prevent failures of critical components. However, due to the absence of standardized defined functionalities of Digital Twins and the associated software tools, the creation of Digital Twins is linked to a high expenditure of resources. This effort is due to static connections of components within the IT-architecture, which cannot be reused for other Digital Twins, as these IT-architectures are mainly single-case solutions. Although there are approaches for creating flexible IT-architectures, these have not yet been examined in depth for their reusability to build Digital Twins with different implementation conditions. Therefore, the goal of this case study is to investigate the reusability and the associated reduction of effort involved in building Digital Twins. For this purpose, the approaches of an IoT-platform and a service-oriented architecture are combined to create a reusable and flexible IT-architecture for Digital Twins. This IT-architecture is applied to a first use case of a Digital Twin for a compressor and then adapted to a second use case of a Digital Twin for a wind turbine. These use cases have different implementation conditions, but both find application in predictive maintenance. Finally, the reusability is evaluated and, in this context, the extent to which the resources required for building Digital Twins can be reduced when utilizing a flexible IT-architecture.