A team from XSB including CEO, Rupert Hopkins, board member Bob Solomon, and Andrew Bank won the award for best paper in the 2022 World Standards Day paper competition. Their paper, entitled “The Next Generation of Engineering Standards: A Proposal for Digital Transformation”, addresses the shortcomings of legacy PDF engineering documents and industry standards and proposes a technical solution to benefit all parties involved including standards developers, enterprise software providers, standards end-users, manufacturers, and others involved in the engineering supply chain.
Their solution, called digital twin documents, builds on the familiar concept of the model-based enterprise. Digital twins were born during the 1990s as 2D part drawings were transformed into 3D CAD models, resulting in dramatic productivity improvements in design and manufacturing.
A digital twin document is a standardized data-centric representation of a flat-text document in which each of the data elements — such as text, tables, graphs, equations, images, requirements, and more — are transformed into individual, interoperable, and reusable data points, connected in a network of references and related concepts. These data points are aware of their position in the network, their status (active, inactive, superseded, etc.), and their relationship to other data points, and can therefore communicate to end users about changes and the impact of those changes on other parts, materials, or processes. SWISS digital twin documents are structured sets of data that are machine readable and even machine interpretable. The authors believe that in the near future, engineering documents and industry standards will be read and interpreted as much by machines as by humans.
Digital twin documents can enable a new world of capabilities and value-added benefits that are impossible to achieve with PDF files and like their CAD counterparts, they will jumpstart another massive wave of productivity gains.
You can read the full paper in the Standardization Journal at the link below. Please share it with your colleagues and let us know your thoughts.
Read the full paper here.
The World Standards Day Paper Competition is sponsored by SES – The Society for Standards Professionals.