Generating Digital Twin Cockpits for Parameter Management in the Engineering of Wind Turbines

Abstract

The complexity of wind energy systems combined with an increased trend towards mass customization require the collaboration of many experts to achieve high quality products. Currently, a major issue arises from the lack of data integration among the different tools used during the engineering process which may cause system failures eventually. Existing tools largely do not support automatic detection and indication of erroneous or contradictory parameter values between artifacts of different tools. Employing a model-driven and functional engineering approach enables to establish an integrated toolchain for the management and visualization of engineering artifacts that consume and produce the data. Within this paper, we present an automatic approach to derive an engineering digital twin for the cooperative development and management of engineering artifacts from functional models of the system under development. We evaluate our approach on the example of a hydraulic pump within the cooling system of a wind turbine. The prototype can be coupled with an existing engineering tool ecosystem. The approach enables to exchange the data produced by engineering artifacts according to a functional system model which facilitates the cooperation between different stakeholders throughout the development process.