Digital Twin and Embedded Software

Earlier, I had written an article about the Digital Twin for on-board software where I talked about the value of digital twin for developing software-intensive products. In this article I want to highlight again the importance the digital twin plays and why it is nearly imperative for companies.

Digital twin is as much about front-loading principle as it is about orchestrating work for each and every one of your engineers in the right context at the right time.

So digital twin really applies to all industries, where the key benefits come from fast model development cycle, high quality demands, limiting development cost and providing digital continuity from design phase into the operation and deployment phase. In most of the engineering domains this already exists and many of our customers ask if they have to develop software-intensive products, does digital twin approach apply to them; I would argue YES. 

Even if you consider that the embedded software is already a digital code, you actually utilize this digital code to drive safety critical algorithms. A software digital twin is much more than the code: a model of its context, its interfacing with physical product, of its variants, abstractions for separating applications from target platforms and much more. And so you, as a software manager, have an opportunity to predict the final software behavior much early in the development lifecycle and build development experiences for your engineers that occur in a more synchronized fashion. So it’s not just about that individual work or engineering role, it’s about the entire journey that is leading up to your final product.

So, to do digital twin experience right, you need clarity on the engineering experiences, you need to front-load the right and relevant data, you need to deploy the right technology and you need new agile ways of working.

Siemens PLM Software is a leading global provider of software solutions to drive the digital transformation of industry, creating new opportunities for companies to realize innovation. And we have taken many companies across the globe on this digital twin journey to help them become a market leader.

In the embedded software domain we are working with leading companies to actually orchestrate all the touch points across the entire embedded software development and this requires new ways of working, breaking down silos and thinking about the development experience in the ways they have never done before.

For companies to stay competitive, the digital twin approach is not a nice to have, it is an imperative. In the age of autonomous driving and connected cars, companies have to take charge of managing software complexity and digital twin is the KEY to that.

So the digital twin is just about the most difficult change journey you can go on as a company. You have to get clear on what development experiences you are engineering for, you have to align with your managers/engineers, you have to re-wire the silo teams, and you have to re-engineer your processes. 

Precise use of digital twin for software front loading can reduces the amount of time it takes for implementation, integration and validation activities by almost 40 percent.

Digital twin has become now a fundamental shift that every industrial software development company needs to be thinking about and adapting to. The digital twin approach can help your team go from good to great and will help you not make those same mistakes again.

Watch an On-demand webinar on How to boost efficiency in Embedded Software Development using a Digital Twin approach

Watch an introduction video of Simcenter Embedded Software Designer Create the digital twin of your code

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