Executable Digital Twins — Reimagining industrial operations through Mathematics and Scientific Machine Learning
Dirk Hartmann, Siemens
06 February 2024
In the past decade, the Digital Twin concept has emerged as a major technology trend. A Digital Twin bridges the real and digital world and allows us to reimagine industrial operations like hardly any other technology before. However, today’s approaches are quite bespoke, requiring sophisticated expertise and complex software setups. While a Digital Twin offers a unique opportunity to address the mega trends and challenges our society is facing, we need widely scalable approaches to achieve the required speed and scale of adoption. With the exponential evolution of compute hardware on the one hand, and algorithms on the other, a new generation of computational technology offers unique opportunities for this.
In this talk, we will review the challenges and roadblocks for a broader and scalable adoption of Digital Twin technology – ranging from the speed of simulation algorithms to improved user experience. We will highlight how to overcome these challenges by means of Mathematics and Machine Learning along selected industrial use cases. Our focus will be on key concepts and approaches rather than in-depth mathematical rigor. The emerging paradigm across the presented use cases is the concept of the Executable Digital Twin, which can be queried by anyone on any device at any point in the lifecycle. An executable Digital Twin will be allowing everyone to benefit from improved decision-making through predictive technologies and ultimately allow a scalable approach to a Digital Twin.
For a preview on selected themes addressed in this talk see also our team’s blog.
About the speaker
Dirk Hartmann is an industrial mathematician, Siemens Technical Fellow, intrapreneur, and thought leader in the field of Simulation and Digital Twin. Among many distinctions, he has received the prestigious Werner-von-Siemens Top Innovator award 2019 for his life-time achievements and the Siemens Inventor of the Year 2021 award. Multiple of my innovations have led to novel products and services and have been showcased at top-level innovation events.
In his career, Dirk took several leading roles in research, innovation, and development across Siemens including the lead of a multi-million Siemens R&D program and the technical leadership for the Simulation & Digital Twin field at Siemens Technology with more than 120 scientists across the globe. Beyond this, Dirk is a very active member of applied math organizations, e.g., serving on SIAM’s Industry Committee, and is a also regular keynote speaker in the academic community as well as at executive events.