Paper and presentation at the 10th year Naples Forum on Service by the Expert Group “Smart Services”

How to create service value by a digital twin? How to support business actors in their decision making along the product life-cycle using a digital twin?

The Expert Group “Smart Services” sheds light on these questions by the paper entitled “Service value creation using a digital twin” by Jürg Meierhofer and Shaun West. The presentation of the paper at the 10th year Naples Forum on Service by Jürg Meierhofer aroused lively interest and triggered interesting discussions.

The digital twin is conceptualized from the service perspective and how it can provide services that create value for a range of actors within the ecosystem. Given the concepts of service-dominant logic and service design, approaches are described for designing and delivering value to customers based on the digital twin. The technological concept of the digital twin is made up of the different layers of the twin and their contribution to value creation. The twin is structured in a layer for the component, the assembly, the machine, the shop floor / production line, the factory, and the business system. Each of these layers is characterized by specific modeling tools and data requirements and has a particular value contribution to services. Moreover, this value contribution can be assigned to different phases of the product life-cycle and to the actor who is the beneficiary of the services. Following the service-oriented approaches, value is created by linking the digital twin as a source of data to the relevant actors in the ecosystem at the appropriate time and translating the data into relevant information to support decision making.