“The progress achieved through FASTEST will pave the way for a subsequent phase aimed at facilitating seamless information exchange between physical and virtual environments”.
1. How does COMAU’s participation in the project contribute to the development of digital twin technologies for batteries?
Daniela Fontana: COMAU’s main role in FASTEST involves optimising the digitalisation strategy of the project by integrating its In.Grid IoT platform to analyse and visualise the Digital Twin data. Data management tasks will be performed through that platform, enabling efficient data collection, robust data storage, and user-friendly visualization of test results both from physical systems and simulations, thus facilitating the user in utilizing the final fast-track testing platform.
Dedicated services will be developed ad hoc to extend the native functionalities of the In.Grid platform and build the overall Digital Twin architecture.
An intuitive interface will provide users with access to Digital Twin data and offer a range of customized pages and dashboards for data visualization. Information such as Digital Twin models, real-time simulation results, and historical test data will be managed through the platform and provided to users to facilitate decision-making.
Customized services will be developed, empowering users to conduct in-depth analyses, including the examination of trends over time and the exploration of various analytical perspectives. This means that users will be able to study how data changes or evolve over different time periods and explore different aspects of the data to derive valuable insights and make informed decisions.
It is fundamental for a successful exploitation of the digital twin technologies to make it easy for the user to interact with the system and have access to the results: this is the aim of the developments performed by COMAU in the FASTEST project.
2. Can you explain how COMAU plans to integrate the digital twin solution with various stakeholders and systems, ensuring effective data collection and utilization?
Antonio Paolo Passaro: COMAU will lead the definition of software tools, system architecture, communication protocols, data pipelines, and the full requirements for integrating data and model outputs into the platform. In collaboration with the partners developing the different technologies and the end-users, proper communication protocols will be agreed upon, selecting among those most commonly adopted in industrial environments, to make the solution as universal as possible.
A specific service of the platform will be developed for the data collection functionality. This service will be responsible for collecting and storing Digital Twin data in the database and will serve as an interface for other services. It will process and convert all Digital Twin data into a specific format for efficient storage in the database.
In.Grid platform uses managed cloud services to guarantee high availability of software components, ensuring high quality of service (QoS).
3. The FASTEST project will develop a fast-track hybrid platform for battery systems, and COMAU is the partner that leads the Pathway to Market of this technology. Why this FASTEST’s innovation will be attractive for the battery market?
Eliana Giovannitti: As we know, the development of new battery technology is a huge time and resource-consuming task. Several trials are needed to fully understand the behaviour of the product in application and to optimize it. This implies long time-to-market, as well as high costs. There is a need to accelerate the development process, and the adoption of digital twins capable of anticipating the response of the product in different scenarios, coupled with simplified and optimized testing procedures, will offer a powerful tool to reach this target.
Moreover, the progress achieved through FASTEST will pave the way for a subsequent phase aimed at facilitating seamless information exchange between physical and virtual environments. This will involve implementing real-time data collection, storage, monitoring, and analytics, thereby reducing the time-to-market for battery manufacturers even further.