The Executable Digital Twin: merging the digital and the physics worlds

While the digital twin has become an intrinsic part of the product creation process, its true power lies in the connectivity of the digital representation with its physical counterpart. Data acquired on the physical asset can validate, update and enrich the digital twin. The knowledge contained in the digital representation brings value to the physical asset itself. When a dedicated encapsulation is extracted from the digital twin to model a specific set of behaviors in a specific context, delivering a stand-alone executable representation, such instantiated and self-contained model is referred to as an Executable Digital Twin. In this contribution, key building blocks such as model order reduction, real-time models, state estimation and co-simulation are reviewed, and a number of characteristic use cases are presented. These include virtual sensing, hybrid testing and hardware-in-the loop, model-based control and model-based diagnostics.