Digital Twins and Software Services: Leveraging Product Data for Improved Product Development

As the digital transformation continues to evolve, manufacturing companies must adapt by broadening their service offerings to include digital solutions. This expansion addresses current challenges and positions these companies favorably in emerging collaborative production ecosystems, future proofing their business models. This work extends the work done in the research project Product Lifecycle Enrichment as a Service (PLCEaaS) research project that involved partners from academia and industry. It showcases the prototypical implementation of specialized services to enrich a product portfolio. Building on pre-existing use cases and a digital twin based on the concept of the Asset Administration Shell, our primary focus lies in services tailored for enhancing product sizing and facilitating data-driven innovation for product enhancements. Based on this prototypical implementation, the project contents are presented holistically: The conceptual design of the services, the systematic modeling of the digital twin, the application of analytical methods to evaluate the product data, and a possible deployment for users of the services. The services' fundamental functioning and the relevant components' interaction are shown. The paper concludes with a critical review of the research project and addresses open issues in an outlook.