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This paper highlights the necessity for a digital twin of production systems in the automotive industry. The survey on the use case of a digital twin of the production line is conducted with the production planning department of a major automobile manufacturer. The central part of the paper describes the current and future challenges for production planners in integration planning, which are determined by a survey. There are new trends in the automotive industry identified as a result of this survey. The study identifies exactly the information required by a digital twin of the production plant to improve the integration planning process. Furthermore, this survey provides answers to the benefits of integration planning by an automatically generated digital twin.

Increasing competition in the automotive industry makes cost-saving integration of more and more vehicle derivatives and variants such as sedans, coupes, cabriolets as well as electrical and combustion engine models into existing production systems necessary. At the same time, the production planners face a major challenge while integrating vehicle bodies-in-white. In contrast to the original concept and rough planning state, the automated production plants are continuously optimized during the detail planning phase as well as after the start of production as a result of improved processes and model upgrading. For fast integration of new vehicles, a current digital image of the real production plant - the so-called Digital Twin - is groundbreaking. This Digital Twin of a factory consists of a current bill of resources for cost calculation and a current layout planning state. The paper describes a concept for creating a Digital Twin of a body-in-white production system for the concept and rough planning projects. In the internal concept planning phase, planners do cost calculations and layouts for ordering factory suppliers. However, for integration planning, the original concept and rough planning project have to be updated. Therefore, a new concept has been developed which uses current information from the cyber-physical system and a current 3D scan to update the bill of resources and the layout planning on demand.