The Industrial Digital Twin Association (IDTA) was launched on March 2. The organization was founded by 23 founding members from the electrical, mechanical engineering, software and user industries with the participation and initiative of the industry associations VDMA and ZVEI .
Andreas Orzelski is not only active in the standardization of Industrie 4.0 for Phoenix Contact, but is also involved in the board of the IDTA: “Phoenix Contact has been active in the Industrie 4.0 platform from the very beginning and is helping to drive the topic of the digital twin. The so-called administration shell (the “Asset Administration Shell”) is the implementation of the digital twin for Industrie 4.0. With the IDTA, this manifestation of the digital twin is now to be established worldwide.” The implementation of the digital twin is not yet the talk of the town, but the Phoenix Contact expert emphasizes: “In many areas, we are already much further along than is perceived from the outside.
Joint instead of proprietary
Orzelski highlights the importance of collaboration within the IDTA: “Through the focused cooperation of the partners involved, we are concretizing many Industrie 4.0 projects. We are developing common standards instead of proprietary systems in order to actually share the data of the digital twin and thus realize entirely new opportunities for collaboration.”
The way in which the models and interfaces of the digital twin are structured determines the degree of possible interaction within the value chains. In this respect, the IDTA is definitely in competition with other digital twins, as Orzelski describes. “Therefore, our goal in the IDTA is to make the Asset Administration Shell even better known and easily available via open source. With standardization and the inclusion of cross-manufacturer security, we will achieve the next step in digitization and thus in Industry 4.0.”
