Digital twins for rail vehicle designs

This chapter describes the application of digital twin techniques in the design phase of railway vehicles. The design phase can gain important benefits from the application of digital twin techniques that allow the creation of reliable numerical models to predict the behavior of the vehicle during service. This allows the design to be correctly addressed to achieve the requested performance and safety objectives. For this reason, the development of advanced numerical modeling techniques was introduced very early both to evaluate the dynamic behavior of the vehicle and to evaluate the structural behavior, initially as simple numerical models but later extended to include different manufacturing and verification stages of the vehicle’s production. The recent introduction of active components and on-board monitoring systems has allowed to use of more advanced types of digital twins capable of communicating with on-board sensors and determining the behavior of the actuators effectively. The chapter traces the evolution of digital twins used in vehicle design and analyzes the most commonly used types.