A digital twin architecture for effective product lifecycle cost estimation

Lifecycle cost estimation is crucial for high-value manufacturing sectors, in particular at the early product design stage, to maintain their product affordability and manufacturing profitability within the market. Accordingly, it is important to identify through-life cost reduction opportunities. However, this is a challenging task for designers at the early product lifecycle stage due to the lack of complete historical data and the existence of high-level uncertainties within the product and service cost data. Moreover, the complexity of maintenance, repair, and overhaul interventions during the operation stage reduces the designers’ decision-making confidence level at the earlier stages. This paper aims to address these challenges by proposing a novel Digital Twin (DT) architecture that uses adaptive data structure and ontologies to automatically produce the cost model from data mined information throughout a product lifecycle. The DT architecture supports designers by capturing data in terms of consumed and caused cost and automates the data flow to provide an adaptive cost estimation method across the product lifecycle. The DT enables designers to estimate the lifecycle cost at the early stage and to identify the through-life cost reduction opportunities effectively. Thereby, it is expected that the proposed DT supports OEMs to reduce the total lifecycle cost and improve the efficiency of their product development. A case study of lifecycle cost estimation in the machine tool industry is considered for testing the validity of the DT architecture.