Conceptualisation of digital twin-enabled new product design framework for the automotive industry

The digital twin (DT) has created various opportunities for product development businesses to exploit data obtained from the physical model. With the lack of standard architecture, many companies use their own big data to develop their digital models without any roadmap. In this research, data classified as visualisation and interaction is integrated with the new product design framework at all four design stages, namely concept design, detailed design, design verification, and redesign, with varied data contributions to the design. Using synthetic data, the design concept of the medium-duty truck frame assembly was iteratively tested using ten load instances before being finalised. The results are encouraging since the overall weight of the frame assembly was reduced by 9% while maintaining the frame assembly's strength and safety factor. The design iterations have come down to 3 iterations from 6 iterations, which is a 50% improvement over the traditional product development processes.