AFRY Real Digital Twin Framework

To secure your data and establish a digital thread—achieving complete control over communication within and towards your production—enhanced testing and verification is essential. This is best achieved through a digital representation of your facility, which is precisely what AFRY Real Digital Twin offers.

AFRY Real Digital Twin is a standardised package solution of software that we use to streamline and enhance automation projects, reducing risks, improving quality, and shortening time to production.

By using RDT in the early stages, we can achieve up to 95% completion of PLC code before any physical implementation, reduce deployment and ramp-up time by up to 80%, and cut project development time by up to 30%.

The Real Digital Twin Framework (RDT) is designed to help our customers quickly gain control over their work and progress in automation projects while also reducing on-site testing time.

AFRY RDT is compatible with various automation suppliers like Siemens, ABB, and Delta V, reducing the risk of supplier dependency. AFRY RDT will deliver hardware emulation and process simulation to test and evaluate PLC code. RDT will facilitate the project to optimise testing of automation, make it possible to test early in the process and thus shorten the overall test time. In addition, some of the activities can be moved from the physical factory area to the simulator. The degree of detail will be decided together with the customers project team.

Beyond immediate customer project benefits, RDT serves as a valuable tool for education, analysis, and training throughout the lifecycle. RDT serves as a platform to continue digitalization further in production, train operators, simulate errors or changes, and connects various levels of OT/IT integration and more.

Why chose AFRY Real Digital Twin?

RDT is developed to help our clients get early control of the work and progress in automation projects. By early control we mean:

• Improved understanding, handovers, and relations between disciplines
• Structured workflow and early verification of setup
• The ability to identify and address issues long before physical implementation (fail early)
• Virtual tests before physical installation such as Unit tests, vFAT, vSAT etc.

When working with AFRY RDT, the end result is a high-resolution digital twin – but the journey is the real value. The RDT architecture is divided in levels that are scalable and easy to adapt to customer needs. Each level and step of the journey has a significant value.

Summary of AFRY RDT benefits and capabilities

Reduce time and costs 

• Replace your own simplified self-tests with RDT testbed for greater precision
• Up to 95% ready before physical implementation
• Reduced commissioning and ramp-up time up to 80%
• Reduced project development time by up to 30%

Reduce risks 

• Iterative testing of developed OT systems results in higher code quality
• Endless virtual stress tests for improved quality
• Realistic operator training in OT/IT systems and analysis of possible problems

More qualified tests before implementation 

• Use to verify and improve PLC code, find and correct issues that otherwise would not have been found before deployment
• Emulated hardware in testbed for OT/IT integration (Batch, SCADA, MES, IT)
• Commissioning of a control system with higher quality, further stress tested and with faster ramp-up time

Life cycle perspective 

• Increased knowledge and understanding of the plant and a tool to continue to develop digitalization
• Testbed for monitoring systems (DCS, MES, SCADA etc.) and AI integration, generation of industrial IoT data
• Patching, training, troubleshooting and optimization