Digital Twin Enablement through Automated PLM Deployments: Accelerating Hardware Product Development

Abstract

The use of digital twin technology radically revolutionizes hardware product development through the real-time synchronization of physical and virtual equivalents. Seamless integration of Product Lifecycle Management platforms with sophisticated engineering and manufacturing workflows is necessary to achieve the full potential of digital twins. This material describes an automation-centric approach to facilitating digital twins through optimized PLM deployments that utilize infrastructure automation and config management to accelerate environment setup, minimize integration complexity, and maintain consistency between development, QA and Production. The article utilizes infrastructure-as-code processes, containerization platforms, and declarative config management to normalize deployment processes while removing the need for manual configuration bottlenecks. Deployment on a big-ticket aerospace hardware program shows significantly faster environment setup times, accelerated iteration cycles for product verification, and improved integration between engineering and operations staff. The findings indicate that auto-deployed PLM is a key enabler of digital twin adoption, enabling more agile and cost-effective development of hardware products. Companies that deploy the framework realize stunning reductions in configuration drift events, expedited design verification cycles, and enhanced simulation correlation to physical test results, making digital twin technology a strategic differentiator in competitive production settings.