Andreas Heckmann
Andreas Heckmann graduated in mechanical engineering at TU Munich in 1999. In 2005, he received his Dr.-Ing. from the University of Hanover with a thesis on flexible multibody systems. He has been a research associate at the German Aerospace Center (DLR), Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics since 2000. In 2014, he was appointed to one of the two heads of the Vehicle System Dynamics and Control department, which became part of the Institute of Vehicle Concepts in 2025. Since the inception of the internal long-term project Next Generation Train in 2007, Mr. Heckmann has organised the vehicle dynamics and control tasks. Since 2022, he has led the Digital Twins work package in the Europe's Rail project MOTIONAL. He is the primary author of both the Modelica Flexible Bodies Library and the Railway Dynamics Library.
Session
This papers reports on activities in the European project MOTIONAL that aims at the development of a digital twin environment which facilities the modularity, interoperability and composability of complex digital twin assemblies of railway systems. The approach that refers to the Functional Mock-up Interface is justified by a discussion of the comparable activities in industry and in the automotive field compared to particularities in the railway system. The work was initiated by the selection and analysis of nine use cases. An introductory digital twin example illustrates the current implementation status and related aspects, while an outlook presents the integration into the Federated Rail Data Space as the business case and as a vision of the activity.