Digital Twins are dynamic virtual replicas of manufacturing or production processes. They mirror their real-world counterparts, the live processes.
A Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News article, Beyond Process Development: AI Reshaping Use of Digital Twins, highlights the evolving use of digital twin technology in the Life Sciences industry.
Initially, the most common use of digital twins in biopharma was for process development. Engineers would use a combination of historical and experimental data as well as sound scientific principles to model, test, and then fine-tune unit operations.
Industry experts, including an Emerson consultant, made several thoughtful points.
“Digital twin technologies can bring value across the entire biopharmaceutical development chain, leading to faster time to market. As a result, we are seeing digital twins implemented at every stage of the pipeline.”
In the process development phase of the lifecycle:
“…digital twins can help teams improve their understanding of the process and drive predictability across the entire development stage. Teams can use digital twins to unlock rapid prototyping, reduce the overall number of experiments necessary to define the process, and define the specific parameters to provide an optimized process.”
For full commercial operations:
“Digital twins provide an ideal platform for training and testing, to drive operational excellence. A robust simulation platform facilitates the movement toward more autonomous operations, improves performance predictions, drives predictive reliability, and ensures product quality.”
Other applications for digital twins highlighted in the article include:
- Using simulation to improve processes and product purity
- Optimizing spray drying to reduce product variations
- Creating soft sensors that are virtual models for hard-to-measure attributes
- Facilitating tech transfers from small lab-scale to full-scale manufacturing
- Informing manufacturing equipment selection
- Optimizing and unlocking manufacturing capacity
Industrial AI is helping to streamline the process of building simulation models.
“Today, instead of needing many process engineers to spend months of time to perform the modeling, AI tools reduce the barrier for configuration.”
…
“We can use AI to build deterministic models and then also use that same AI to perform hybrid modeling—which is especially helpful where the modeling strategy is unclear and we do not have the mechanistic models to bridge the gap with empirical models.”
Together, digital twin technology and industrial AI could…
“…eventually make twins self-optimizing, allowing them to adjust and predict in real-time to maintain optimal conditions and prevent failures without human oversight… This move towards autonomous manufacturing will greatly enhance efficiency, quality, and compliance, ultimately speeding up the delivery of life-saving therapies to patients.”
Visit the DeltaV Simulation Cloud and Life Sciences sections on Emerson.com for more information on how these technologies can digitally transform your operations.
