This presentation by Boris Marovic was made at the NAFEMS eSeminar "Simulation & Digital Twins - Behind the Buzzwords" on the 2nd of May 2018.

The concept of the digital twin applies to many domains from design to manufacturing, the application in the simulation field should start as early as possible and throughout the whole product lifecycle. As costs for changes increase towards the end of the product development process, simulation should apply as early as possible. Many other influencing factors for a successful application have to be considered in the development process of a product such as the input of data from experiments to calibrate the simulation models, definition of simulation and testing scenarios for such calibrations and comparable simulations, efficient and fast turnaround times for simulations to feedback information into the design and the connectivity to other domains such as system, CFD and structural simulations. But also the management of such vast informations from experiments and simulations together with the CAD geometry variants through design exploration tools and PLM systems for product development documentation. All these points play an important role for the integration of the digital twin application for simulation in the design process. Design explorations with a rapid turnaround time and an application very early in the design process requires automation of the usually time consuming tasks such as meshing and experimenting of many design variations through parameter studies. However, for all disciplines a key requirement for the digital twin is to model the reality and especially in simulation the accuracy of results should not be sacrificed by automation or model simplification.