Denmark’s first center for Digital Twin research hosted by Aarhus University aims at determining when Digital Twins are worthwhile for industry use. Xcelgo are currently collaborating with the center to develop Digital Twins of automation systems.

While ’Digital Twin’ has been an industry buzz word for several years, it is still an extremely complicated and time-consuming process to develop real Digital Twins with real-time communication. Last year, Aarhus University launched its Centre for Digital Twins to support and ease the development of real Digital Twins.

“This is Denmark’s first center for Digital Twins, and it’s bound to cause disruption in the future,” says the head of the center, Professor Peter Gorm Larsen, Department of Engineering, Aarhus University.

The center primarily focuses on developing Digital Twins from models used in the engineering and development of the physical product or system, thus maximizing the value of the models, and easing the modelling process. These reused digital models will run inside a co-simulation in parallel with their physical counterparts and provide valuable feedback.

Xcelgo will deliver Digital Twins for applied research

The Centre for Digital Twins conducts a number of collaborations with companies in the industry to undertake applied research into Digital Twins.

“We want to make sure that our research actually provides value in the industry, so we’ve partnered up with several companies that use these technologies,” says Professor Peter Gorm Larsen.

One of these companies is Xcelgo. Xcelgo has been granted funding from the EU-funded project HUBCAP that is coordinated by the Centre for Digital Twins:

“We see several promising perspectives in working with Xcelgo. We are creating an orchestrator following an open standard called the Functional Mockup Interface originating from the automotive sector enabling the combination of several simulation tools, and within this we want to utilize Xcelgo’s 3D modelling software to simulate automation systems,” Professor Peter Gorm Larsen says.

The last years, Xcelgo has been working towards developing real Digital Twins. For instance, Xcelgo and Danish Technological Institute recently achieved real time communication between the physical world and virtual world within a Digital Twin of a slaughter line, and according to Xcelgo CEO Bent Aksel Jørgensen, the company will focus more on real Digital Twins in the future:

”We are currently taking the first steps in creating real Digital Twins with real-time communication, and we look forward to creating even more advanced models and innovative use cases in collaboration with the Centre for Digital Twins,” says Bent Aksel Jørgensen, the CEO of Xcelgo.