Digital Thread

Everyone is talking about the digital twin – even in the shipbuilding industry. But is there something like an industry-wide understanding of what companies in the maritime industry mean by the term ‘digital twin’ and what they expect from it? To find out, PROSTEP conducted a cross-enterprise survey of shipyards, owners, suppliers and classification societies. Due to the novelty of the topic, we assumed that companies have different ideas about the digital twin. In many cases, it is indeed still considered a vision or a marketing buzzword. But there were also positive opinions: “We shouldn’t let ourselves be intimidated by the novelty of the topic. Many things already represent the ‘state of the art’ and can be used for innovation,” said a shipyard representative. At companies already implementing their first digital twin projects, the level of maturity of these projects varies widely. A key finding of the survey is that better collaboration between all the parties involved in developing and using digital twins would be desirable, but the uniform standards needed to achieve this are lacking.