Digital twin-enhanced product family design and optimization service

Complex product family design and optimization has been a prevailing challenge for enabling mass customization and personalization paradigms with many effective methods featured to manage the high variety of customized product components with extended life cycle concerns. However, these existing approaches either largely depend on the qualitative marketing strategies leveraged before product development, or the quantitative data collected and analyzed during usage due to a lack of context-aware testbeds to support product family design and optimization throughout the asset life cycle. To overcome this challenge, digital twin, as an emerging concept empowered by the cutting-edge information and communication technology, has been widely adopted to realize context-aware systems across many sectors. Motivated by its advantages of high-fidelity simulation and cyber-physical interconnectivity, a generic digital twin-enhanced approach is proposed to support the in-context virtual prototyping and reconfiguration/redesign of the complex product family with life cycle considerations. Moreover, leverage on the digital twin environment can facilitate modular/scalable design of physical products in the early design stage, functioning alongside the established product-level digital twin to support the optimization of existing product family in the usage phase. Finally, a case study of 3D printer family design and optimization is presented to validate the feasibility and effectiveness of this digital twin-enhanced service approach.