Method and system for restoring consistency of a digital twin database

US12265548B2 · kind B2 · utility

Assignee

• Siemens Aktiengesellschaft · DE

Inventors

• Mark Buckley · Munich, DE
• Rakebul Hasan · Munich, DE
• Martin Ringsquandl · Rosenheim, DE
• Johannes Maderspacher · Garmisch-Partenkirchen, DE

Key dates

• Filing date: Oct 25, 2023
• Grant date: Apr 1, 2025
• Expiry date: Oct 25, 2043

Classification

• Technology area (CPC G): Physics
• CPC primary: G06F16/215
• WIPO field: Computer technology
• WIPO sector: Electrical engineering

Abstract

To restore consistency of a digital twin database, identifiers with metadata imported from various data sources are processed by an encoder, which computes latent representations of the identifiers that are compared by an efficient similarity metric. If the respective similarity score exceeds a threshold, a match is detected between the identifiers. In that case, the digital twin database is updated by aligning the first identifier and the second identifier. This matching algorithm for equipment identifiers updates the digital twin data automatically and continuously by aligning identifiers which refer to the same piece of equipment. The updates flow directly into the digital twin database, thereby removing the manual effort. Using approximate nearest neighbor methods is highly efficient, especially for large plants. The encoder is implemented as an autoencoder which relies only on unlabeled training data. This unsupervised approach is more suitable for industrial scenarios where labeled data is expensive to create.