Digital Integration-Twins using Mixed Reality for smart Product Integration in the context of System of Systems

Abstract

This contribution presents a concept for the integration of multi-disciplinary smart products into a comprehensive smart product ecosystem in order to fulfill an additional product-overreaching function or service. One of the key elements of the proposed concept is the use of specific digital product twins from the existing smart product ecosystem in operation. These “digital integration-twins" of the smart products in the product ecosystem are systematically created. They are described by a subset of the respective digital product twins, with a specific focus on product integration. These digital integration-twins contain integration-relevant processes, methods, and product data (e.g. partial product models, and usage data in the information technology sense) which are managed and distributed by a comprehensive system of the system integration platform. The current use of the new smart product is virtually visualized, integrated, and implemented within the real product integration context and the existing (physically operating) smart product ecosystem supported by immersive mixed reality techniques. This enables fast, easy and goal-oriented development of cross-product functionality in a hybrid way (mixture of physical and virtual products) already in the virtual product development phase (e.g. virtual user-centered validation of functional interaction in interactive sprints) and iterative optimization. Finally, the presented concept is implemented for a real existing use case.